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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.