When almost 80 second years left the Systems and Compilers (SYAC) module exam of their Computer Science course last week, they were not discussing how they had answered the questions, but whether or not they had previously seen the answers to them.
The exam is made up of three questions, two of which the student must answer. However, two of these were identical to the questions from a past paper of two years ago, model examples for which were available to anyone who could find them on the VLE.
One unhappy student told Vision: “This is not the sort of inconsistency you expect. It’s bad enough for us, but all the years after us are paying £9,000 a year, if this was to happen to them it would be totally unacceptable.”
Because even students who had seen the papers had no idea that they were the ones that would be used, Dr. Paul Cairns (Chair of the Board of Studies) argues that there was no unfairness: “Students were only advantaged by being particularly diligent [in finding the past papers] and I would hope that diligence would be of advantage .”
The course reps for Computer Science left a message in the Facebook group giving Cairns’ response to the student’s outrage. Students were told on behalf of Cairns that they were not disadvantaged as with two more papers for this module “everything will average out” and that finding the past paper in question would have been merely the equivalent of “finding a good textbook”.
The department admitted that this repetition of questions was not in line with the guidance tutors are given when setting questions. The closest thing to an apology the students got was being told via the course reps on behalf of the department that Dr Jeremy Jacob, who taught half the module and set the repeated questions “had been a bit careless”. Cairns though emphasises to Vision that the repetition “was a pragmatic decision in the circumstances in which the exam was set”.
Nothing will be done to amend this disparity in the immediate future, yet Cairns explains to Vision that there will be a “Part A examiners board (in about a month) at which point we will have the results of several assessments…The matter is not being brushed under the carpet but will be addressed through the processes of the department that are already in place”
I don’t really get what the issue is here. Surely any students who had revised thoroughly enough had used the past papers that were obviously made available to them? So there shouldn’t have been any disadvantage to anyone who had put in enough work. Also, especially with them being second years you’d have thought they would have known past papers were available.
Re: “This is not the sort of inconsistency you expect” – isn’t this an example of a consistency? The questions were consistent with what had been asked before.
Re: “questions from a past paper of two years ago” – that’s strange given this is only the second year that the SYAC module is running. (This year: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/modules/2012/syac.html – Last year: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/modules/2011/syac.html – Didn’t exist the year before: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/modules/2010/syac.html – Also of note that the paper setter in question doesn’t appear to have taught the module before this year.)
@Dan: the module is only `new’ because it is one of the post-remod modules, there were two previous modules that were combined to produce SYAC, one of which is where the questions were from.