Should Examination Audit be introduced as a compulsory practice in universities?
With increasing privatization of higher education globally, the practice of overmarking and passing non-deserving students has taken deep roots. We see results everywhere almost 100%, and majority students getting first class/distinction/ Grade 'A'. This superficially creates an impression as if all institutes are getting all high IQ students, and the teaching-learning-evaluation cycle is running beautifully. However all those part of the system know the reality. Reality is that professors are under pressure to pass everybody, even those who have left answer-sheets blank, or have written same 2-3 useless sentences multiple times! Unfortunately most professors succumb to this pressure. This is not only happening at the UG level but at PG level and in Ph.D. programmes too. We are collectively allowing a large mass of incompetent and unemployable youngsters to enter the workforce. Long-term impact of this ill-practice is bound to be a disaster. To curb this, practice of making Examination Audit compulsory for all universities may be useful up to some extent. This in fact can be made one of the parameters for ranking universities . The Examination Audit mentioned here is proposed to randomly select few question papers and evaluated answer-sheets of an already-conducted exam, and then getting them assessed by the neutral external experts to find out whether the questions were of acceptable quality, and whether poorly-written answers were overmarked. Any malpractice if detected, then should result in punishment to the guilty.
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Gedamu Gebreamlak Hailu
I agree with the introduction and practice of "Examination Audit" in Universities. Poor quality of education should not be left for some authorized bodies and academicians alone. Instead, it should be taken as a nationwide issue for a given country and a global issue at large. This time, not only due to privatization of universities (higher education institutions) but also the biased intra-institutional competition among public universities has been obviously seen as the main source ‘poor quality of education’ and the production of large number of students graduating with 'inflated grades' year-after-year.
Above all, in taking quality assurance measures in education, such as in using of "Examination Audit", it is vital to note that ‘bias’ in education particularly ‘inflated grades’ may not be resulted from ‘poor standard’ examinations only. The way the exams given, cheating during examination, pressure of authorized bodies on teachers to allow more students to get high grades and to some extent teachers' personal needs may also add to "poor quality of education" and large number of students who are incompetent in reality but who are graduating with 'inflated grades'. Therefore, in addition to practicing "Examination Audit", using of standard way of re-evaluating students at some point using ‘standard examinations’ prepared by external bodies is vital. For instance, in my country, evaluating graduating students using an "Exit Exam" prepared by the country's ministry of education has been started since recent years. After all, producing highly competent students should be the primary aim of universities. Universities should be judged by the quality of their students as evaluated by external (neutral) bodies but should not be based on the number of high grade scoring students in the grades they give.
Hayder Algretawee