Increase in numbers of postgraduate students worldwide represent an opportunity and necessity for nurturing and recognising the diversity of culturally inflected research topics, methodologies and expression. However, there are tensions in the definitions, encouragement and recognition of diversity in theses, and in balances of power in…

Assessment of practical clinical skills is essential in the health fields. Objective Structured Clinical Exams (OSCEs), where examiners assess students performing clinical procedures on simulated patients (actors), are central to the evaluation of practical skills. However, traditional OSCEs require considerable time-investment to administer, and…

Most research into research supervision practice focuses on functional, collegial or problematic power-related experiences. Work developing the supervisory role concentrates on new supervisors, and on taught development and support programmes. Most literature on academics' professional learning concentrates on learning to be a university…

Protocols from 108 administrations of the Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales were evaluated to determine the frequency of examiner errors and their impact on the accuracy of three test composite scores, the Composite Ability Index (CIX), Verbal Ability Index (VIX), and Nonverbal Ability Index (NIX). Students committed at least one…

Although many articles have been written about thesis assessment, none provide a comprehensive, general picture of what examiners do as they assess a thesis. To synthesise this diverse literature, we reviewed 30 articles, triangulated their conclusions and identified 11 examiner practices. Thesis examiners tend to be broadly consistent in their…

In practice and process PhD examination is distinctive, reflecting the high expectations of students whose learning has been directed to their becoming researchers. This article builds on previous research on the examination of Australian theses that revealed that examiners in Science (n?=?542) and Education (n?=?241) provide a substantial…

Assessment and feedback remains one of the categories that students are least satisfied with within the United Kingdom National Student Survey. The Student Charter promotes the use of various formats of feedback to enhance student learning. This study evaluates the use of audio MP3 as an alternative feedback mechanism to written feedback for…

Poststructuralist perspectives on the discursive construction of identity and critical approaches to linguistics, discourse analysis, and language testing have contributed to a growing awareness of the complex social nature of performance in speaking tests. In this article, I explore how the concept of co-construction is useful to understand how…

A central issue in language testing is the choice of norms, and the need to reconcile notions of "standard" English with local language norms and features. Data from studies of international intelligibility indicate that some features of "standard" language descriptions, based on native-speaker language use, are not essential…

The school as an institution assumes that students' grades are constituted by their assessments. This paper examines the background of this presupposition and provides a micro-analytical perspective of the grading practice of teachers in German High Schools ("Gymnasium"). This paper conceptualises the theoretical framework of the research in…

The question of what a doctorate is has been looked at before. The author argues that the issue of "doctorateness" is a recurring debate which needs to kept alive and revisited regularly. The aim of this article is to suggest five different areas or arenas in which the question can be addressed, forming a framework which can perhaps be…

The Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) method has been the proposed teaching method under the current national English curriculum since 2001. However, few studies have investigated in-service teachers' response to this proposed language teaching method. In this study, thirty public school English teachers were recruited in Beijing across school…

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect is the difference in the test performance between classes of the same school with and without external examiners. The indirect…

A study was conducted to determine the extent to which high school and college/university Advanced Placement English Language and Composition readers value and implement the curricular requirements of Advanced Placement English Language and Composition. The participants were 158 readers of the 2010 Advanced Placement English Language and…

This report outlines the final recommendations of the review of external examining arrangements undertaken by UUK and GuildHE and chaired by Professor Dame Janet Finch, former Vice-Chancellor of Keele University. The review found that, on the whole, external examining arrangements in the UK are working well, but the report offers recommendations…