Comments on External Examiner's Report for Advanced Certificate in Powder Diffraction 1999/2000 School of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London

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The overall views of the external (visiting) examiner regarding this new distance-learning course taught via the Internet at Birkbeck College are generally very favourable.

With regard to the comments in section V of the report, the original proposal for assessment was stated to be based on marks distributed as follows: 50% unseen written examination paper, 35% project, and 15% coursework. In hindsight this was a fortunate choice: due to the pressure in completing the new electronic course material, teaching staff were somewhat limited in the first year of the course by the amount of coursework that could be set and then assessed. The distribution of marks as proposed originally were therefore appropriate for the first year.

For the second year of the course, the amount of assessed coursework has already been increased slightly. There are several reasons for this:

• Firstly, feedback questionaires indicate that assessed coursework helps improve the students' understanding of the course material, especially when it is tied in directly to the release of related course material.
• Secondly, there is a need for the Internet-based Advanced Certificate courses within the School of Crystallography to be more uniform in their approach to assessment, a recomendation given in the report by the Quality Assurance Agency panel visit of February 2000.

Since the Board of Examiners' meeting, the relevant college forms (filed under QME 2000/1) have been completed proposing modification of the distribution of weighting of marks for the academic year 2001/2 onwards.

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