All of us have ghosts. Hamlet’s happened to be his father; mine, rather more mundanely, is the teaching quality assessment (TQA) exercise.
The TQA, of course, hardly qualifies as a ghost except by stretching the definition to include almost any memory of anything. And yet I would claim that in my own case it is more than a memory. I see it, as Hamlet says, in my mind’s eye. What I see is a seminar of first- or second-year students — I forget which exactly even though I remember their presence — sitting in a line, backs to the wall in a long, thin room. I am sitting at the end of the line, pretending to be invisible yet manifestly and clumsily there. The tutor is there, too, at the other end of the room, sitting behind his desk but trying to appear as if there is no barrier between him and us. The whole thing is impossible; the room won’t allow for any other arrangement; no-one is comfortable or relaxed. What makes it all the more intolerable is that the tutor is quite obviously a nice person and excellent scholar. He deals easily and professionally with the text, but such is the stress in the room that responses from the students are limited to coughing and blinking.
It is his first experience of TQA and my first visit. Neither of us could have expected anything quite so awful. On another occasion I would simply have said I’d come back later, perhaps to another session, but on first visits both parties stick to the rules and the agenda. All I can report to the TQA team leader is that the session was ‘satisfactory’ given the criteria, but it is a superficial judgement. One session in a visit covering three or four days should not, of course, be decisive, and it is true I saw some excellent sessions, but that first one would not go away. However, its impact did begin to fade at the end of the visit when the team had to present its overall judgement to the vice-chancellor in front of senior staff from the department. One expects vice-chancellors to be grown up, measured, sensible, not petty tyrants ready to humiliate their staff when a few strangers give a snap-shot of one or two days’ teaching. The judgement we offered of the teaching as ‘overall satisfactory’ was, however, a signal for a piece of thoroughly despicable bullying — a hand waved airily at the staff; a question about what had they got to say for themselves; the answers self-evidently were not required or listened to.
My ghost is not really that I remember all of this but rather that there has never been a way of apologising to those staff. Perhaps on reflection I would change my view of their merits, but the system doesn’t allow for that. But even if it did it would not take away the unpleasantness or the loss of professional status in the eyes of their institution that those colleagues had to endure. The best that seems available is a kind of silent penance and the hope that the years have softened the bitterness of disappointment. But it is not a very hopeful hope, especially as TQA seems about to walk again through our midst. I refer to the Cooke recommendation that external examiners’ reports be published, making reference to aspects of the teaching and learning on the basis of what has been read in exam scripts and essays. It does not take much imagination to guess how these reports will be used by a trivia-hungry media or by compilers of guides to universities.
So far there has been no move to train external examiners in QAA-speak to ensure the parity of such reports. Nor are the protocols yet clear. Will departments have the chance to object? What happens if an institution changes a report? Will students be able to use the reports as evidence of poor teaching? And what of the different systems in old and new universities, where external examiners operate according to different understandings? All the questions that shadowed TQA seem about to surface again even as many humanities departments find their funding being cut or even being closed because of RAE results. All the doubts about what we are doing and its value seem ready to undermine the changes we have been forced to make in order to accommodate learning outcomes, programme specifications, criteria-based marking and the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to.
We are indeed back, as it were, in the first scene of Hamlet, but at least this time we know the murderous plot in advance and stand a chance of outwitting the old mole in the cellarage.
