External examining: closing the feedback loop

In this article from the Autumn 2004 issue of Directions Vera Bermingham and Graeme Broadbent (both of Kingston Law School) call for a greater exchange of information on the experiences of external examiners.
The role of external examiners in maintaining and improving the quality of work in higher education is recognised as vital, but the potential of external examining activity in enhancing quality could be expanded by increased emphasis on the dissemination of good practice which external examiners find in the institutions that they visit.

As anyone who has ever done it will know, external examining can be a lonely occupation. Quite rightly, external examiners exercise independent judgement when carrying out their functions. The external examiner reports to the institution on her/his opinion of the standards and procedures of the examining process, and the institution then reports back on any action taken as a result of any concerns or suggestions for improvement. In addition, examiners are often asked to identify any good practice they encounter. This information is presumably disseminated across the university (though examiners do not seem to be told that this has occurred) for the benefit of other faculties or schools.

It is by no means certain that the matters identified by one examiner, whether positive or negative, will be shared amongst the other law externals, though this will probably be the case, as matters arising from examiners’ reports are, in our experience, usually aggregated and distributed amongst the panel of externals. There is, in any event, rarely a forum for panels of external examiners at a particular institution to get together to discuss their views of the way in which that institution conducts its assessment practices. Whilst it is, of course, proper that examiners should exercise independent judgement, once this has been done it is surely beneficial for collective discussion and debate to occur. This would at least increase the pool of knowledge created by the panel of examiners, often significant in numbers, thus creating the potential for tested ideas to be fed back not only to the institution examined but also the examiners’ host institutions.

However, host institutions do not generally make much use of the intelligence gathered by their own staff acting as external examiners. There is no mechanism whereby the external examiner’s host institution might benefit from this, nor, indeed, for it to be more widely disseminated. The 2003 UKCLE/ALT conference on external examiners in law identified a general lack of interest by host institutions in learning from the experiences of their staff who act as external examiners elsewhere.

Another beneficiary of more open discussion of the experiences of external examiners would be the wider legal academic community itself, which remains in ignorance of good practice perhaps on its very doorstep, unless individuals are prepared to search external examiners’ public statements across all law schools. Under the new reporting mechanisms for external examiners, the public statement might include a section inviting external examiners to comment on any good practice that they have encountered that might be more widely disseminated.

Whilst this might go some way to enabling good practice to be more widely publicised, and, although it might benefit the institution that is the recipient of the favourable comment, it does not feed into the general community of any particular discipline. Often, good practice is discipline specific, and what is needed, it is suggested, is a mechanism whereby good practice in law can be disseminated to the legal academic community. This is a role UKCLE could fulfil by providing an electronic forum where such information could be deposited and accessed. Good ideas could be made more widely available and much wheel reinvention avoided. It might be that what is good practice in the context of one law school might not be suitable in another. But at least the ideas would circulate and be taken off the peg, adapted or rejected, and an information exchange could take place.

There is, however, an ethical issue here. The current system preserves confidentiality between examiner and the institution examined, and rightly so. By inviting external examiners to make a public statement of good practice, institutions are thereby agreeing to the wider dissemination of those examiners’ ideas of good practice. The wider forum proposed above is one to which, it is suggested, it would be appropriate for the institution to contribute to rather than individual external examiners. We seem as a profession to be reticent when it comes to publicising the good things that are happening up and down the country in law schools. Having a central repository for examples of good practice can surely benefit everyone, and could be done anonymously to avoid blushes. We spend much time berating ourselves for our shortcomings. We should spend more on celebrating our successes.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010