External peer review of assessment: an effective approach to verifying standards?

Abstract

There is growing international concern to regulate and assure standards in higher education. External peer review of assessment, often called external examining, is a well-established approach to assuring standards. Australian higher education is one of several systems without a history of external examining for undergraduate programmes that is currently considering the approach. What can entrants to external examining at that level learn from the UK higher education system's long history of external examining? To that end, this paper reports on a mixed methods research project designed to investigate current practices in how academic standards are conceived, constructed and applied by external examiners and debates the implications of the findings for the development of external examining in other countries. The findings suggest that the potential of experienced peers in a subject discipline to provide the assurance of standards is limited. It concludes by presenting various possible enhancements that might be considered.

Keywords:

• external examiners
• higher education
• quality assurance
• standards

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper was jointly sponsored by the UK Quality Assurance Agency and the UK Higher Education Academy.

Notes

1. www.utas.edu.au/serru/nprn.

2. See, for example, the reports from the Australian Go8 Quality Verification System listed on its webpage: http://sydney.edu.au/ab/qvs (accessed 24th October 2013).