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TimesLIVE reports that an academic at the University of SA (Unisa) has expressed fears that lecturers will be “pressurised to falsely inflate marks” as pass rates in modules are among the performance indicators now used to determine staff bonuses.
The academic’s concerns come after the institution included for the first time the ‘throughput rate’ of students as one of the criteria for assessing academic performance. According to the academic performance agreement template, staff in all faculties and departments opting to use students’ throughput rate as one of the criteria will be awarded a score of between 1 (throughput rate for a module of less than 55%) and 5 (throughput rate of more than 90%). The academic, who wished not to be identified, said the new performance management document “creates an explicit incentive to inflate the pass rate”. The academic noted that lecturers have extraordinary discretion about how ‘strictly’ to set an assessment and how strictly to mark it and went on to comment: “What is being required in this new performance management document does not assess lecturers on their efforts but the outcomes of those efforts. Basically whether one will receive a bonus is now informed by how many students you pass.” The academic observed that the law college “had exceptionally high pass rates in June, which were much higher than in previous years”. Unisa said each department determined its own performance indicators and academics had a say in how the performance management process worked.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Prega Govender at TimesLIVE
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