What that screenshot doesn’t show is the OES score (because I keep such things to myself) – which seems to be an endangered species at the moment. This presentation of S197 was the last that will give a score, the current presentation of S194 that I’m working on won’t give a score, and that little habit will soon be spreading to other courses, apparently. I’m not happy about this. Read on below the cut for why…

According to the OU, percentage scores aren’t useful in giving feedback to students on where they went wrong on a course and how they could improve. They also don’t tell employers who are looking at your qualification what you’ve proved you can do. The alternative is to mark against a course’s Learning Outcomes – so in future, you’ll get “Just Achieved”, “Achieved” or “Well Achieved” against a Learning Outcome to indicate a pass, or “Not Quite Achieved” or “Not Achieved” to indicate a fail. There’s a post in OUSA 10-Pointers by the Course Chair of SK183, Audrey Brown, explaining the full rationale behind all of this, if you’re interested, along with a rather heated debate on the subject. Guess where I got the inspiration for this post…

I have no problem with the OU providing feedback against the Learning Outcomes – indeed, any feedback against a result can only be a good thing – but I don’t see why the percentage mark has to be abandoned to do it, other than as a result of pandering to political correctness. The score serves several useful purposes, not least in being a motivational tool – for me, each course is a constant quest to push the scores higher, to see what I can get, and the result for one course acts as the baseline for the next. A simple “Pass” doesn’t provide that motivation. Even going back in the process to look at assessment – in the ECA for S197, for example, you can look at each question, see the number of marks on offer, and work out from that how much information you need to provide (no point writing three paragraphs for a 2-point question). With the ECA for the current S194 presentation, by comparison, you can’t do that – some questions specify “two or three sentences” to clue you in, but not all, and you generally have no idea what the weighting of a particular question may be. How does that help? The point has also been made by others that, if you’re trying to decide what courses to take with one eye on the classification of a future degree, you want to take the courses where you’ve got the best chance of gaining a high mark, and the new “achieved” comments don’t help you do that.

I don’t see what the issue would be with providing both a percentage score and feedback against the learning outcomes. I truly think to OU are making a mistake here – I just hope enough pressure can be brought to bear to make them see a little sense.