Watch out: assessment power struggle is about

Historians are worried about the slowly expanding powers of the Quality Assurance Agency. Anthony Fletcher explains why.

The History at the Universities Defence Group has sent vice-chancellors, principals and heads of history departments a statement of its concerns about the Quality Assurance Agency's academic review scheme. We in the group see threats to institutional autonomy and evidence that the agency may seek to exceed its powers.

The Social History Society and the Historical Association have said that they wish to be associated with the statement.

As historians and academics, we fully accept that the QAA's subject reviews enable funding bodies to discharge their statutory responsibility to assess the quality of the education they fund. However, we regard the academic review to be implemented in Scotland in 2000-01 as raising important issues of principle about the relationship between the QAA and the sector over standards.

First, there is a threat to the degree-awarding powers of universities. A key question in the QAA's April Handbook for Academic Review asks reviewers to evaluate "whether student achievement meets the minimum expectations for the award as measured against the relevant subject benchmarks and the qualifications framework".

In his response to our statement, John Randall, QAA chief executive, said the agency is seeking to judge "the extent to which the intended outcomes of programmes are actually achieved by the generality of students".

How can reviewers reach a secure judgement, as he defines it, without looking at a substantial sample of every student's work. This would fall foul of QAA rules precluding reviewers from considering work to be assessed by external examiners.

If this rule is circumvented and the principle of an inspectorate of threshold attainment is conceded, the sector will find it impossible to halt a wider challenge to institutional degree-awarding powers.

Then there is a threat to diversity and creativity. This is inherent in the manner in which the benchmarking exercise has been developed. The QAA's 1999 guidance to benchmark groups required them to specify threshold and typical levels of student attainment for use in academic review while, at the same time, forbidding them from referring to degree criteria for assessment.

Thus the QAA is setting up its own parallel bureaucratised assessment scheme based on checklists of learning outcomes. The history group has declined to provide such checklists, but we fear the possibility that history reviewers might be led to develop such material from the subject statement in order to carry out the review of student work expected of them.

It is the manner in which benchmark statements, with their summary checklists, will be used that threatens to control and distort the processes of curriculum planning, teaching, learning and assessment.

The QAA has come to recognise the danger of a culture of compliance that will stifle experiment and diversity. Programme specifications "should not simply be copied from a subject benchmark statement", it declares. Mr Randall has reiterated the QAA's urging "that the processes used by institutions to approve and review programmes should foster creativity".

But we believe the prescriptive impact of benchmark lists of outcomes will be unavoidable in a scheme in which intended learning outcomes are judged against benchmark statements, the content and design of the curriculum is judged against programme specifications, assessment must cover every significant outcome and reviewers will record their scrutiny of student work in this respect on pro formas.

The QAA may be ushering in a national curriculum, which, if it does not actually prescribe content in most subjects, will nevertheless limit constructive change in the light of developments in the discipline and will restrict the development of teaching and learning by insisting on the mechanistic fulfilment of demands set out as skills and attributes. The agency's philosophy trivialises and compartmentalises intellectual activity.

Christopher Kenyon, chairman of the QAA board, has arranged talks with us. We hope that before academic review is launched in England and Wales in January 2002, the QAA will modify its plans to inspect student work and clarify its purpose in doing so. The first step should be an explicit abandonment of the review of threshold standards. It is not too late to put the scheme on a basis that will command respect and willing support across the sector.

Anthony Fletcher is convener of the History at the Universities Defence Group and professor of history at Essex University.

Soapbox, page 20