I had an interesting conversation today with a person visiting UNE from a Group of Eight University.   He wanted to talk about academic standards.  His perspective was that UAIs ensure that student standards are maintained.  The Group of Eight obviously have high academic standards as they attract and graduate students with high UAIs. 

My perspective was that UAIs only predict a part of subsequent academic performance - higher in some areas such as maths and science - but probably only about 50% overall.  Also, most UNE students do not come directly from school anyway so UAIs are of even less use for them.  He said, quite rightly, there is no doubt that post Bradley there will be pressure on Universities to demonstrate academic standards, so if not through UAIs how will we do it?

My response was firstly that looking at internal systems by time series is of limited use.  We can see how many students passed exams in the past, how many achieved distinctions etc but there are issues with such comparisons, not least of which is that virtually nothing has been held constant: not curriculum content, teaching approach, assessment rules, assessment tasks, teaching staff and so on.  Also, if the rest of the world has experienced grade drift or grade inflation, is holding out against drift doing a service or disservice to students?

My second response was that I think the answer lies in peer review and to do this we will need to modernise, make more efficient and apply something approaching an external examiner system.  Interestingly, while most parts of the Commonwealth developed systems of externals in line with the mother ship (and that includes New Zealand) Australia didn’t to any great extent at undergraduate level.  I could see us piloting a small sample of units in differing academic areas and at differing levels, and doing blind comparisons of assessment standards.  We would need to have a sign off on which institutions and which people would be approved for this, but with a small number of externally referenced points for standards comparison, it would then be easier to then tie the bulk of our internal processes to these.  While not assessing students against an ‘absolute’ or ‘gold standard’ this would at least lend some validity to our assertions that the academic judgments we are making by discipline area and level - ie the knowledge, skills and attitudes the students have demonstrated - are shared with colleagues from equally reputable Universities.

Any comments?

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