Workshop: Towards Utopia: training teaching assistants to mark consistently

This workshop aims to share learning around some of the challenges associated with the changing environment of higher education and the increase in use of inexperienced postgraduate teaching assistants for marking. The increased fiscal pressure in higher education has in turn led to large cohorts and an increased load on the provision of marking and feedback. The current solution explored by the authors’ engineering faculty is to utilise Teaching Assistants (TAs) to provide the required capacity where the problem is most acute, early in the degree programme where student numbers are high and iterative report writing supports learning.
Whilst the approach does redistribute workload from academics, ensuring quality and consistency of marks and feedback becomes a significant challenge. Through utilising a new digital interactive suite and a reflective marking exercise the authors were able to bring down inconsistencies between TA and academic marking agreement from up to 5 grade boundaries down to less than 1 grade boundary.
Workshop structure
• Introduction and scene setting
• Participate in a blind marking cycle
• Participate in a group marking cycle with further instruction
• Participate in a final marking cycle
• Feedback to the workshop personal experiences
• Authors to share the experience of running a training programme for 8 TAs to mark ~800 lab reports.
ILOs
• Assess the current fallibility of marking and grading
• Develop strategies to improve consistency amongst TAs
• Reflect on current practice.