Board of Examiners Meeting for 2001/2002 School of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London

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Board of Examiners Meeting for 2001/2002

An examiners meeting was arranged at the ESRF, Grenoble, France, on Tuesday, 20^th May 2003. The meeting wa arranged so as to co-incide with a powder diffraction experiment involving Paul Barnes and Jeremy Karl Cockcroft on the beamline ID31 of Andrew Fitch. The meeting had been delayed from earlier in the year, when Paul Barnes had been unable to attend.

Present on Tuesday 20 May 2003 at 10:00:

Dr Jeremy K. Cockcroft (Chairman)
Prof. Paul Barnes
Prof. Andrew N. Fitch (External)

The final assessment for each student was printed out. Each candidate was discussed in turn and the final public results recorded. This latter document was subsequently printed out and signed by the chairman and external examiners.

The final mark was based on the new weighting scheme: 20% for assignements, 30% for project, and 50% for written examination. Marks were used as is: there was no re-scaling of any marks.

Most of the candidates required little discussion since the decisions were obvious in most cases:

1. One candidate (Z. Yuan) was just above the border line between pass and fail.
2. Another candidate (J. Bursik) was 1.4% below the merit and distinction border line. This candidate, from Prague, Czech Republic, was discussed at great length. He had brought to the attention of the course director the fact that he had suffered poor access to the web course during September 2001 as a result of the extreme flooding that occured at that time in Eastern Europe. This meant that he had been unable to access the final pages of the web course, some parts of which were examined in half of question 15 of the written examination paper. The question was raised as to whether he might have achieved sufficient marks to obtain a distinction had the flooding not occured. If the candidate had scored an extra 4 out of 5 marks on half of the last question, then this would be only be equivalent to an extra 1.3% (=50%*4/150): this would still leave the candidate just below the cutoff point. Given that this was the last question of the paper, and based on his other marks, it was felt that the candidate would not have achieved even 4 extra marks on this question. Thus, the general consensus was that overall a pass with merit was the correct result, especially given the relatively poor achievement by the student on his project.

The problem of project submission was discussed again. Result was slightly better this year, and would have been better if one candidate had not given up after a poor showing in the written examination. The revised marking scheme for the project was also briefly discussed. It appeared to show improvments over previous ones, but more statistics were needed.

External Examiner's Report

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