Minutes of Meeting on 26/04/2017

In attendance: Bjoern Franke (Director of Teaching), Paul Anderson (UG1 Course Organiser), Christophe Dubache (UG3 Course Organiser), Jennifer Oxley (Computing Support), Sharon Goldwater

Bjoern and Sharon have been in discussion about setting up a survey for MSc Students to find out what the students expectations are when they start their courses, are their expectations met? is the courses meeting with what their expectations are when they apply for course and what the expect from their Degree. This will be different from the PTES survey University wide survey which closes on the 16th June, this one will be specifically for Informatics information only and is intended to directly inform changes of the MSc programme. The plan is to open the survey soon and close it towards the end of May.

MSc
BIO2 coursework 2 – the students felt the feedback was quite brief and would have liked more information.

IRP/IRR
There was more discussion about how the IRP and IRR courses were graded. Previously both IRR and IRP were pass/fail, where course credit was considered for progression/degree classification, but the no course mark was considered for the calculation of averages. The University has changed regulations and pass/fail courses now count towards averages (where a pass counts as a mark of 50%). In order to enable students to obtain a better mark than 50% and to encourage early focus on the project we changed IRP to carry a numerical mark rather than to keep it pass/fail. IRR is different in that nuanced marking of a literature review is difficult and the School would encourage students to focus on training this skill rather than worrying too much about marks. Hence, we kept pass/fail classification for IRR. The School continues to review its arrangements for both IRR and IRP, though.

It was also mentioned that deadlines cluster at the end of semester. Bjoern said this is to some extend unavoidable since some pieces of coursework can only be handed out or started once the material has been covered in the lectures and students also require sufficient time for working on the coursework. Generally, this problem is related to short semesters (please also see this document for last year’s consultation on the structure of the academic year:  www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/consultation_document.pdf). The School is looking to reducing assessment via coursework for the future.

IMC
The students would like more revision material to be made available or some kind of clarification on what slides would be useful to the exam. They have asked the lecturer with no response.

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2 Responses to Minutes of Meeting on 26/04/2017

  1. s1668298 says:

    So IRR now counts towards our average even though it’s not graded, just given pass/fail mark?

  2. s1678551 says:

    Will the IRR grade of 50% be counted in our average or not? For example, if a student has an average of 70% for all modules besides IRR, will this 70% be pulled down by the 50% grade of IRR?

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