Auditing Nightmares

I’ve been rather busy auditing the marks for several papers. Of all the modules that I checked, less than half of them were without error. There was only one engineering module that had some minor problem and was promptly fixed. However, for some reason, every management module that I audited had problems in them, with some very major problems, beyond my pay grade to solve.

For this particular module, there were no marks written on the answer scripts. In fact, there were numerous sheets with not even a scratch on them. This means that there is no indication that the sheets have even been read. Then, there were not marks written on the sheets themselves. So, I could not check if the totals in the mark book were actually correct. Even the final totals on the mark book are incorrectly entered. And finally, the distribution of marks were skewed.

I then emailed the examiner with a list of the problems and asked to meet up to rectify them. I was then asked by the examiner to fix some of them myself, and ignore some of the other problems. Obviously, I bumped this up and was told that I could not do it myself, for very obvious reasons that it’s just beyond my pay grade. Since I was lucky enough to have been assigned that module, I was the one who had to settle it.

I was told by the department that the examiner is from the business school next door. So, I called them up to contact the examiner. I was then told that there was no such person. Then, I asked if there might be an external lecturer with that name and was told that there was no such person. Panic!

Then, I dug up the earlier email from the examiner, which listed a mobile number as a contact number. I called up the mobile and got the examiner on the line. I then found out that the examiner lives in a second city and teaches at a third university but is also attached to an institute within the university. So, I guess that the examiner is some sort of adjunct lecturer. However, the examiner is currently overseas and will not be back until next week.

So, I set up a meeting with the examiner. However, I’ve just been told that I might not need to meet up with the examiner as the matter might be taken out of my hands. This is a problematic issue as the marks are needed by last week. We have bumped the issue up and are waiting for more direction. I’m hoping that they will take the thing out of my hands as there is little that I can do about it anyway, except act as an errand boy.