The Role of External Examining in Higher Education: Challenges and Best Practices: Volume 38

Using an external examiner in an institution is not a new phenomenon; the evidence of having an outsider to scrutinize the quality control process has been prevalent since the 1800s. However, the concept has undergone considerable changes and has been subjected to mounting criticism and validity of the process. There are several challenges that are faced by institutions in recruiting and defining the role of external examiners and the assumption that they are assessment literate. Universities are engaged in safeguarding the procedure, and at the same time, enhancing the quality standards. Researchers have been collaborating to create best practices and working on key developments that would ensure that degree standards are maintained in higher education. There is no “one size fits all” guidelines, but hiring an external examiner with the view to safeguarding academic quality is the prevalent norm across the globe. The book on the role of external examiners put forth such challenges and best practices by academia in various parts of the world. Authors have written about how to mitigate disadvantages and how to create opportunities without compromising the quality assurance process. International standards have been discussed with the view to make external examining a rigorous process that is fair, reliable and consistent.

Traditionally the role of the external examiners in UK universities or more formally Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is that of quality assurance (QA). Typically, an experienced academic who is not affiliated with the HEI (i.e., someone from another university) is invited to act as an external examiner for a particular course or a module. The external examiner’s primary role is to provide impartial and independent advice to ensure academic standards are upheld for a degree program; and that the degree is comparable with similar programs across the country and that the achievements of students are also comparable with students on courses at other universities. This primary role makes external examiners highly valued people in UK universities, and as a result, their views are nearly always taken seriously. Over and above this recognized primary role of QA, external examiners can also be engaged by the host university in other ways. These additional roles or tasks of the external examiner can help enhance teaching and learning in higher education. This chapter will reflect on the range of roles, including the ones that go beyond QA.

External examining activity is a recognized indicator of subject expertise and peer esteem. It also evidences understanding of quality assurance, course, and assessment design. As such, it contributes to the enhancement of an academic CV and may impact on promotion and career prospects. Fair access to external examining opportunities is thus an equity issue for universities. In the context of race equality, where both staff and students of color in academia show consistently differential outcomes to their White counterparts, professional development can mitigate disadvantage, especially where it is focused on access to opportunity. Professional development for external examiners has been an underdeveloped area but the recent establishment in the UK of the Degree Standards Project has begun to address this. The authors propose that there is nevertheless a gap in provision to support academics who aspire to become external examiners but who have had no previous experience. This chapter describes an institutional initiative to promote access to initial external examining roles through professional development and reports on participant outcomes. Evaluation data suggest that an approach such as this can help with obtaining a first appointment and may help to mitigate some of the barriers of access to external examiner roles for staff of color. The authors argue that the sector urgently needs to diversify the ethnicity of the external examiner pool in order to provide an essential critical lens which could impact on the equity of degree outcomes for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students.

A key role of the external examiner is to review student work submitted for assessment plus the feedback and grading undertaken on that work by academic staff. The aim of this is to ensure equitability between the assessments of individual students’ achievement and consistency and comparability across courses throughout the program and with commensurate study levels and programs at other institutions, whilst safeguarding academic standards. The variety of assessment-types that an external examiner may review can be diverse. When the primary focus of the work being assessed is tangible, such as with written examinations or assignments, external examiners are able to view student achievements and assessor actions through a lens comparable to that of the original assessors. However, this process cannot adequately capture assessment-types where the only evidence is proxies to the original achievement. In this chapter, the authors explore the concept of authentic assessments, the benefits of incorporating them within study programs, identify challenges pertaining to their presence to holistic quality assurance (QA) processes in general, and the role of the external examiner in particular. The authors will demonstrate how adopting non-intrusive technologies for recording and verifying authentic assessment practices can strengthen the QA process for the benefit of all stakeholders. For illustration, a case study is employed to demonstrate how these challenges have been tackled regarding performance-based authentic assessments at an institution in Norway. The chapter concludes with a summary plus a call to arms for further research into how quality and consistency can be assured when authentic assessments are employed.

This chapter explores the numerous considerations that an external examiner (EE) of an undergraduate degree within a further-education (FE) college must be mindful. There may be the perception that our academic experience of lecturing within a university equips us with the knowledge to collaborate with colleagues within an FE institution. However, this is valid only to a certain point. There is a spectrum of contrasts between the higher education (HE) and FE environments that are reflected within the comparisons that this chapter highlights between the teaching-and-learning experiences. If we think back to the original purpose of an EE (where Oxford scholars were invited by Durham University to provide external guidance in the nineteenth century), we can appreciate the key task of an EE and its aim: to assess the comparability of student achievement. The landscape of HE has changed considerably since then, and now undulates with numerous opportunities for learners to gain a HE qualification. It is this difficulty in assessing comparability that an EE of a HE course within an FE environment must be willing to acknowledge. The fact that the student-and-learning experience varies wildly in HE and FE muddies the waters for the EE: how can comparableness be assessed?

External examining imparts one of the pivotal means for ensuring the monitoring of the guidelines and standards within private autonomous universities and institutes. External examiners are considered independent individuals who can provide unbiased, objective evaluation, and informed comment on the student’s quality of the project as compared to the standards. Hence, the role of the external examiner is vital and has a strong influence on institutional quality assurance. The qualitative research has primarily aimed to study the external examining practices involving a private university in India. Interviews were conducted mainly with the external appointed examiners; however, the internal faculty guides or supervisors were also made to participate in separate interviews. The results were coded following the content analysis framework. The research unraveled Pandora’s box of the system bottlenecks and challenges concerning the expected and actual practices. Limitations, recommendations, and future research implications were discussed.

Professional Doctorates (PDs) have been added to the curriculum of many universities worldwide, as an alternative to the traditional Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). PDs are more focused on practice-based knowledge that advances professional practice and contributes to society, industry and the economy. The dominance of the PhD as the typical higher degree by research has led universities to develop frameworks for their PDs which are very similar to the PhD framework. This includes the assessment of the PD, which in many cases follows the same process and is based on the same criteria as for the PhD. This similarity in the assessment of the two types of doctorates creates challenges for external examiners (EEs), who are invited to evaluate the contribution of the PD within frameworks which are tailored around the PhD. Here, the authors focus the investigation on the Doctorate in Business Administration and conduct a review and analysis of institutional documents from universities in England in an attempt to understand the similarities and differences between the examination process of the PD and the PhD and the extent to which the examination process of the PD supports the evaluation of the practice-based contribution that is at its heart. Through this review and analysis, the authors identify the challenges that exist for EEs who are called to assess PDs, and make recommendations which will support EEs to evaluate the contribution of the PD.

The primary roles of external examiners at the University of Mauritius (UoM) are to assist the university in ensuring that degrees awarded meet international standards, that assessment is valid, and that procedures and arrangements for assessment, examinations, and determination of awards are sound and conducted rigorously, fairly, reliably, and consistently. External examiners come from a wide range of highly reputed institutions across the globe and the UoM has a set of external examining policies that act as a guide to external examiners. At the end of their visit, the external examiners submit their signed reports to the Vice-Chancellor. The reports, which include their concerns, are circulated to all administrators and academic staff for their review and analysis. Analysis of the external examiners’ reports (UoM, 2016–2019) reveal that 28% of the UoM external examiners come from the UK, 39% were from South Africa, and the remaining 33% from Australia, India, and other European countries. Overall, 98% of external examiners have rated the UoM programs as average and above compared to institutions where they had experience of external examining. The contributions of external examiners are highly valued in the continued growth of the new vision of the institution aspiring to be a research-engaged and entrepreneurial institution.

This study compares quality assurance across two case studies in the UK; a commercial organization operating in the private sector and a university. Case Study A is a private education organization specializing in the delivery of business and management programs. Case Study B is a university that delivers courses across four academic schools and through a number of partnerships. The business school offers a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in business management, economics, accounting, events, tourism, marketing, entrepreneurialism, and human resources. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 organizational members from across the two organizations including 8 academics/tutors, 6 of whom are also employed as external examiners and/or external quality assurers (EQAs). The study compares the remit of both EQA working on behalf of awarding bodies and external examiners working on behalf of universities. The EQA role is conceptualized as an “arbiter of standards” whereas the external examiner is more likely to be considered as “critical friend.” This variance in conception has important implications for the way the process of quality assurance is conducted and utilized in support of program and institutional development. The research finds that one of the most significant differences between quality assurance processes in Case Studies A and B is the way in which student feedback is collected and utilized to support and enhance the process of review. This chapter provides recommendations designed to capitalize on the value of the quality assurance process through greater alignment of teaching and assessment strategy and policies and procedures in practice.

The United States (US) has accreditation agencies that assess higher education in a manner analogous to external examiners in the United Kingdom. An example accreditor, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, requires university-level Educator Preparation Program providers (EPPs) to evaluate the degree to which (a) their graduates feel prepared to assume their professional roles as a result of their EPP training and (b) their impacts on PK-12 students’ learning. These are meaningful forms of programmatic assessment, however, governmental agencies in the United States do not uniformly collect these data. This has required many EPP providers to do so, with unintended negative consequences. The authors use this context as a case study to examine what must be done when reporting guidelines do not align with the data available. Although a single example, readers are asked to consider analogous situations within their own contexts. Presented in this chapter is the accreditation landscape, a description of the challenges listed above, common solutions, and recommendations for greater coordination among stakeholders in order to expand the systematic conferral of data in safe, ethical, and meaningful ways.