Purpose
The main purpose of external examiners’ reports is to provide evidence of:
- the comparability of the standards of Brookes awards, measured against national expectations
- the fairness and rigour of assessment practices
and also
- to promote enhancement of Brookes’ provision, by identifying strengths and weaknesses and making suggestions for improvement.
Templates
External examiners’ annual reports are key documents in assuring the academic standards of the University’s awards, so it is essential that they are comprehensive and cite the evidence upon which their judgements and comments are based. All external examiners are asked to submit their reports on the University’s template, which has been designed to meet national expectations for such reports and is available on the APQO website.
Reports for collaborative programmes should, where appropriate, distinguish between issues that relate to the home programme and those that relate to the provision delivered by different partners.
Staff and students’ names should not be used in reports – they will be removed before publication of the report on PIP.
Submission of reports
You are asked to submit your annual report to the APQO (via the externals@brookes.ac.uk email account) within one month of the examination committee for the provision you examine. Failure to submit reports in a timely fashion or to provide them to an adequate standard in the required format, will be regarded as grounds upon which to terminate an external examiner’s contract. The APQO will send out reminders when reports become due (or overdue), but the University reserves the right to withhold payment of fees if the report is so late as to be of no use (see Use of reports below).
Annual reports should be submitted – in Word format - by email on the electronic template to a dedicated external examiners’ email address managed by the APQO: externals@brookes.ac.uk. Receipt will be acknowledged by the Academic Policy and Quality Office, who will then make arrangements for payment of your annual fee.
Responses to reports
Once received, the APQO sends the report to the Subject Coordinator/Programme Lead or Liaison Manager (LMs are responsible for ensuring reports on collaborative provision are copied to programme managers at partner organisations) and other staff responsible for academic quality and standards of provision in the Faculty: namely, the Associate Dean (Student Experience), the Principal Lecturer for QA within the Faculty, and the Faculty Quality Officer.
Responses are prepared by the subject or programme lead, liaising as necessary with the Associate Dean Student Experience (ADSE) and support Directorates, to incorporate responses to any institutional issues that have been raised. Responses should be approved by the ADSE and sent out to the external examiner within six weeks of the report. If you have made negative answers to any of the yes/no standards questions on the report template, the Associate Dean will meet with the programme leader and other colleagues to address the issues immediately, and draw up an action plan for monitoring by the Faculty quality committee.
Use of reports
Your annual report is a key source of evidence in the annual programme review process. Any issues identified for action by the external examiner must be included in the annual review action plan, which should be shared with you. If it is not sent to you as a matter of course, please ask the Programme Lead or Programme Administrator.
An annual analysis of the institutional issues, identified good practice, and any areas of concern (that are serious, or common across a number of reports) raised in external examiners’ reports forms part of the Annual Quality Review prepared by the Head of the Academic Policy & Quality Office for consideration by the University’s Quality & Learning Infrastructure Committee. External examiners’ reports, together with responses from programme teams, also provide direct evidence on the quality and standards of provision for periodic review and re-validation panels.
Publication of reports
External examiners’ reports are made available to University staff and students through publication on the VLE. The University does not place the full reports received from external examiners in the public domain, but under the Freedom of Information Act it may be asked to release them on request. The information released in response to requests for the personal details of external examiners will be limited to name, job title and the name and address of the examiner’s employer as this concerns an examiner’s professional and working life and such information is considered to be already in the public domain. If an examiner is retired, they will be described as ‘independent’.
Serious concerns about academic standards and quality
You have the right to report directly to the Vice Chancellor on matters which you consider to pose a serious risk to the standards of an Oxford Brookes award. In this case, you may make a confidential report to the Vice Chancellor, Professor Alistair Fitt, at:
Oxford Brookes University
Clerici 2.04
Headington campus
Oxford
OX3 0BP
afitt@brookes.ac.uk
If you consider that the matters you have raised relate to particularly serious, University-wide problems which have not been properly addressed through the University’s internal procedures, you may wish to make use of the Quality Assurance Agency’s concerns procedure. The QAA will investigate concerns about UK higher education providers which indicate serious systemic or procedural problems - details of how to submit a concern can be found on the QAA website.