Hi folks,

Welcome back to the 2021 Academic year.

It is great to see students back on campus. During the commencement on Monday it was great to feel the positive attitudes and energy from the students.

I am pleased to see the new assessment policy go live this coming Monday, 1 March.  Having a university wide policy will help students by providing consistent advice. 

A new set of University-wide Assessment Guidelines will come into effect in from Trimester 1 2021. These new guidelines can be found here. 

Some of the items to note and key changes in the new guidelines include:

Extension policy:
(17a) Any extension request should be before the due date and time, and requests after this will only be considered in exceptional circumstances.
(17b) Students can apply for an extension up to seven days, generally without supporting evidence.
(17c) An additional seven days would require supporting documentation.

Submissions after due date:
(18a) Without approved extension, students will now incur a 5% deduction of the total marks for the assessment task for each calendar day or part day after the due date.
(18b) An assessment task received more than 10 calendar days after the due date without an approved extension receives a result of 0 (zero).
(18c) For mandatory assessment items, students will still receive a result of 0 (zero) if submitted beyond these 10 days, however by submitting before the end of the teaching period this will be deemed to have been received.

Feedback & moderation:
(20) Assessment tasks need to be marked and marks provided to students within 21 days of the submission due date or the actual submission date if an extension has been approved.
(20) Exams should be marked and marks provided to students prior to final grades being released.
(21) The Unit Coordinator will organise moderation of marks where there is subjectivity in the marking of an assessment task and more than one marker is involved. Students should be informed if multiple markers are involved in the unit
(22) Students need to be provided with actionable feedback on their performance. Feedback will be constructive, justify the mark and relate to the assessment criteria. For assessment tasks such as selected-response or auto-marking tasks, generic feedback can be the sole source of feedback. NB Exams do not require feedback. However, take home examinations are governed by the provisions relating to other types of assessments, rather than supervised examinations.

I would like to thank Steve, Simone, Kirra and Trish for working together across teams and Schools to send out a communication to faculty and staff in each school.  This is a great example of working collaboratively across areas. I would also like to thank Steve Grono  for setting up a revised Late Penalty Calculator for assessments in Moodle  that will be used in all Schools across the university. We are fortunate to have people like Steve helping to make our lives easier.

Take care,

Brenda