I understand and largely agree with this examiner.  Support in developing skills is made available through the Disabled Student Allowance and there are plenty of freelance tutors looking for work if an HEI cannot cope with demand (see ADSHE for example ).

If students know they don't have to produce work of quality where literacy is concerned- what is their motivation to do so?

Where spelling punctuation and grammar are NOT to be marked this should be stated in the assessment brief (and apply to all students).

Regards
John

Dr John Conway
Disability Officer
Director of Research
Principal lecturer in soil science
Royal Agricultural University
Cirencester, Glos GL7 6JS

On 5 Aug 2015, at 04:02, Helen Stocker <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:

Dear All

One of our external examiners has questioned our approach to students with learning needs in his examiners report. They said the following:

"I also requested some clarification on the policy concerning Special Circumstances. With some essays, I was asked to mark ‘content alone’, a practice I was not happy with. If students had received support in the writing of their essays, then expecting them to be marked differently from other students ran the risk of doubly benefiting some students. I did not receive clear reassurances on this."

They feel that we should be supporting students in their writing, but not marking their essays differently. I have practical concerns about this as we have a large number of students with dyslexia in proportion to our size as it would be difficult to do this in-house and many of the students don't seem to be taking up their one to one study skills support through Access Summit. I also feel that some mistakes will be made despite the support and students shouldn't be penalized for that.

I need to respond on behalf of our exam board, but not sure of the approach to take. Is general practice to mark the work differently (I have found a number of policies on this) or do we need to go with what the examiner wants and support students in their writing.

Our faculty sometimes struggle to mark work on content alone so advice on how I can help our faculty with this would be appreciated too.

Thank you,

Helen.

[https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0BzT8JmvFtP1FdGNabnlFYmlFYVk&revid=0BzT8JmvFtP1FNmF4Nk02ZmVEaHRhSm9ZWFZseDNjc2JkcUdvPQ][cid:]