HE Music Production Team Handbook 2004-05

HND & HNC Music Production Staff Meeting

The HE Music Production staff will meet in H103 every Wednesday at 11.30am. Teaching sessions need to be finished on time and equipment put away to enable us to stick to this time. Experience has shown that this is essential for the health of the course…and the staff…and the students!
Staff who are unable to attend should send apologies in advance and check with MB for important information.

Regular agenda items will include:

• Assignment IVing
• Assessment IVing
• Student Notes (concerns, queries and information)
• Items from Course Leaders meeting
• Items from College
• Planning
• Equipment/Resources issues

Minute taking will be done by MB. He will email copies of the minutes to members of the Music Production teaching and technician staff, the Head of Music and the Curriculum Area Leader by the end of the working week.

Planning

Bear in mind that we need to keep the units completely separate in both delivery and assessment. I need specific dates for when you plan to move from one unit to another so that top-up students and daytime HNC students know when they need to plan their attendance. These dates must be adhered to.
Plan your assessment and evidencing strategies before you write your scheme. This allows you to teach to the assignments, and also lets us draw up a definitive assignment timetable to make sure the workload is constant.

Please remember that we are teaching the old syllabus to the second years and the new syllabus to the first years. This is a potentially serious area, as a lot of the units have the same names. Please triple-check that you have the right unit details before writing schemes and assignments. Also, second year assignments need the relevant Common Skills listed, whereas these have been dropped for the new syllabus (hooray).

Assignment Setting, Marking and Internal Verification Process

Blank assignment briefs and feedback forms are here. All assignments and feedback must be written using these headings.
Generic grading criteria are here. These criteria must be contextualised and included in the assignment brief. The outcomes and assessment criteria being assessed must also be included in the assignment brief. Assignment briefs must be internally verified before they are set. The internal verification form and internal verification checklist are attached, and there are blank copies in the HE drawer in the HAC music office. The brief is to be given to another member of the HE team, who will fill out the IV form and the IV checklist, making any changes required to the brief. Once these changes have been agreed, listed and made, the assignment can be given to the students.
A copy of all new IV'd assignment briefs must be given to MB, who will enter the assignment details and assessment criteria onto the mark tracking forms. This is an absolutely essential step, as it allows us to accurately track which outcomes have been and will be assessed.
Assignments which have been set must be entered onto the tracking form on the notice board in the staff room in the Hayward Arts Centre. This is vital for accurate tracking and future course planning. The form shows the set date and submission date of each assignment, and allows us to see what assignments are currently set.
The member of staff who set an assignment will mark each student's work, providing them with separate grades for each outcome and word-processed feedback.
Three pieces of work from the assessed cohort are then chosen and internally verified by another member of the HE team. The original assessor will fill out the IV form and checklist for those three pieces of work. The IV will assess the students work and the marks and feedback written by the assessor. They will enter their findings on the IV form and checklist, as well as adding a brief descriptive comment. If there is any disagreement between the marks given by the assessor and IV they must confer to ensure the marks are fair and accurate. No work is to be returned to the students without the IV process being completed and all IV'd marks agreed by both assessor and IV.
Feedback should be given to students during a session, and they should have time to read their individual feedback and to clarify any points. Any general feedback is best covered with the group as a whole, and they can amend their individual feedback with general points if required.

Assignment Submission

All assignments must be handed in with an assignment submission form (attached and in the HE drawer). This gives the student proof of submission, and it allows staff to see when the work was submitted. As we are working in HE, the responsibility for time management and the completion and submission of assignments is the student's. The students are given both group and individual support as needed, and they can apply for an extension from the member of staff who has set the assignment; these are at your discretion. Students must apply for an extension in advance of the deadline using the extension request form, which is attached (copies in the HE drawer). In the event of a successful extension application, the form should be photocopied, with the original kept in the student's file in the HE drawer and the copy returned to the student. The copy should then be attached to the work when it is submitted.

Deadlines are absolute. Any work not submitted in time will not be marked, and the student both fails that assignment and refers on all relevant criteria. The student will then need to negotiate other ways in which they can target those criteria. We can only grant extensions if they are applied for using the correct form and are received at least one week before the deadline date. We need to be hard on this; no exceptions please.

We must ensure that all students remain up-to-date with their work. If a student fails to submit a piece of work it must be noted on their individual mark tracking form and brought up at the next tutorial. To this end, send a memo or email to MB regarding any unsubmitted or referred work.

It is vital that MB receives a copy of all marks achieved and written feedback once the IV process has been completed. This is so that the tracking forms can be updated.
The best way to do this will be to send an email to me at mattb@nct.ac.uk with the information for each student laid out like this…

Please put all marks for each year group into one email, as it will be much easier to add this information to the database.

All feedback sheets should be printed twice; one copy for the student and one copy to be kept in that student's file in the HE filing cabinet drawer in the HAC office. The student's assessed work is also to be kept in their individual file in the HE drawer. They can see their work, but we must retain the original piece of work until the student has either achieved the qualification or officially withdraws.

Registers

Registers must be kept for every session. These must be kept updated as they are regularly scanned by CIS.

Key Dates

• Second year students finish their normal delivery timetable on Friday 27^th May 2005.
• All second year work must be submitted and marked, and all marks and feedback must be with MB by Monday 27^th June 2005.
• The exam board meeting will probably be in the last week of June 2005 (TBC).

Staffing 04-05

	am	pm	ev
Mon	---	HND1 JJ	HNC1 JJ
			HNC2 MB
Tues	HND2 MB	HND2 MB	---
Weds	HND1 MB	HND1 MB	HNC1 DL
Thurs	HND2 MB	HND2 MB	HNC2 JJ
Fri	HND1 MB	HND1 MB	---
	HND2 JJ

MB	Matt Bellingham
JJ	Jared Jackson
DL	David Longdon

Links

• Unit Delivery 04-05
• MB's suggested assignment brief headings
• Assignment submission form
• Extension request form

---

Matt Bellingham
mattb@nct.ac.uk
01952 641 892

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

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