punctilio |pʌŋ(k)ˈtɪlɪəʊ|
noun ( pl. -os)
a fine or petty point of conduct or procedure.
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from Spanish puntillo, diminutive of punto ‘a point.’
My tutor writes:
You are competent in facilitating learning in both face to face and online situation[sic] (See report on peer observation of teaching and feedback comments on the online activities).
This is curious. My tutor has no experience whatsoever of my face to face teaching and no ‘report of peer observation’ has been submitted by my peer observer so any remarks about my face to face teaching are completely groundless. Furthermore there are three orders of magnitude above “competent” in the University’s documentation: Highly Competent, Meritorious and Outstanding. Competent is just above Borderline Fail. So, on the basis of zero evidence I’ve been ‘objectively’ assessed as just above a borderline fail at face to face teaching. Boy, I must be pretty bad!
As if that wasn’t insulting enough, get this. Prior to beginning this course I’ve never in my life had to prepare a list of references for publication, nor advise students on it. I don’t write academic papers, I’m an Artist, I make and teach art and thankfully artists don’t have to prepare lists of references (though if my PGCert tutor had his way…). Anyway, last December Prof James Atherton wrote what I thought was an extremely insightful post on his blog about the ridiculous punctiliousness of some examiners when it comes to referencing essays:
“What does obsessional attention to every detail of punctuation in a bibliography say about what we think is important about an essay or project?”
Quite.
Looking at the assessment guidelines of my course, the weighting of the overall mark is as follows:
| Curriculum issues (25%) |
| Critical thinking (25%) |
| Reflects on own learning (25%) |
| Referencing (25%) |
A quarter of the overall mark, simply for referencing! Are they completely out of their minds? Ok, I signed up for this course so I can’t complain, but I at least thought it might be worthwhile to cite Atherton’s post in my list of references. Great, I thought, his name starts with an ‘A’ so it’ll be the first one on the list. I even checked to see if the 149 page behemoth of University guidelines on Harvard referencing had any rules about the use of colour in referencing. Fortunately since most academics are almost completely insensible to aesthetics (excepting aestheticians of course and even that’s not guaranteed) there’s no mention of point size, font, or colour in the guidelines (good job really, otherwise that would need at least another 50 pages of clarification).
ATHERTON, J,. 2009. On the shibboleth of Harvard referencing. [online]. Available: http://www.doceo.co.uk/reflection/2009/04/on-shibboleth-of-harvard-referencing.htm. Last accessed 02 Aug 2010.
ATHERTON, J,. 2009. On the shibboleth of Harvard referencing. [online]. Available: http://www.doceo.co.uk/reflection/2009/04/on-shibboleth-of-harvard-referencing.htm. Last accessed 02 Aug 2010.
You couldn’t see it could you? I even made the text bigger than it was in the email for you.
Tip: it’s between the ‘ATHERTON, J’ and ‘2009’.
No difference, right? I'm interested that they've actually divided up the marks like this. We used to have these discussions with our FE teachers, who, used to competency frameworks, expected something exactly like this. Their questions made me realise that, actually, to me it was 'obvious' that the marks were on a) answering the question set, b) making a coherent argument, c) making reference to the literature, and d) making reference to the teacher's own experience. In other words, you could fail or get a bad mark if you went off on a tangent, weren't clear, didn't use the literature, or didn't use your own experience. I would give you feedback on referencing, and tell you why it was important, but I would never actually give you a lower grade, if all the rest was in place.
ReplyDeleteYour scheme suggests to me that people are seriously losing the plot....
Oh boy! I wanted to create an immediate response, but all thoughts led on to other stuff... But;
ReplyDelete25% for referencing is simply stupid, and
the date is conventionally in parentheses--but who cares? This academic obsessionalism is the mark of a discipline which has lost its way. And that leads on to the other stuff. I'll get my head round that when I can.
that's unbelievable. It took me ages to spot the colour difference between the blue and black full stop!
ReplyDeleteExactly, the flaw in my use of Harvard referencing was to have got the comma and the full stop the wrong way round.
ReplyDeleteI still can't see it, and I've been looking at this stuff for decades. I thought it was the lack of brackets, but the 'correction' didn't have those either. As far as I can see, it doesn't have the comma and full stop in a different order either. The fact that at least two and possibly four academics can get confused even talking about this insanity shows just what kind of insanity it is....
ReplyDelete