Teaching Strategy Working Groups 2022-23

Working Groups

The aim of this page is to keep departmental members up to date with working group discussions. It will also give faculty the ability to feed into those discussions through webforms and online consultations.

Key documents and recommendations

Teaching Strategy Proposals - Dissertations and Intercollegiate Classes

Terms of Reference

• Computational Mathematics 
• Classes 
• Dissertations 
• Part A 
• Examinations 

What's new

Computational Maths

• It is felt that there are opportunities o include more project work in the degree (particularly at Part A), although there are concerns about the marking workload this would have on faculty. It was agreed that implementing projects should not increase college or faculty workload.  

• The Cambridge model of computational mathematics projects were seen as positive, and might be worth pursuing. 

• A7 Numerical Analysis could be assessed by project rather than written examination, and this is being discussed with the subject panel. 

• Prelims Constructive Mathematics paper could be combined with computational mathematics into one course and assessed by project rather than written examination.  

Classes

• The current scheme is not working for either students or teaching staff. Students report dissatisfaction with class formats, and teaching assistants feel significantly overburdened by classes.  

• Students are very keen to receive feedback on their problem sheets, and currently feedback is variable. Problem sheet solutions are not released in advance, which students report would be a useful resource.  

• Recruitment of tutors and TAs for each set for each course requires a huge amount of time and effort on behalf of lecturers, subject panels and Academic Administration. Heavily oversubsribed courses struggle to recruit. 

• TAs have heavy marking workloads and feel that they are not adequately compensated for tasks such as class preparation and filling in session reports. Many feel that they are not able to give students adequate feedback through problem sheet marking.  

• The scheme relies heavily on DPhil students to carry out intercollegiate class teaching.  

Dissertations

• There are concerns over lack of formative feedback for students, and no feedback is given on dissertations until the final submission.  

• The presentation element of the dissertations could be reformatted to make this a more meaningful opportunity for students and provide another form of formative feedback. 

• There is a lack of incentive for faculty to offer dissertations alongside other commitments. This has resulted in fewer topics for students. 

• Dissertation supervision hours are seen as suboptimal and should be increased, workloads permitting.  

Part A

• It is felt that some short options are not fit for purpose and should either be abolished or made into long options.  

• The structure and content of A2 is not working and the course should be restructured to make this course beneficial for students. 

• The working group are considering whether the Probability long option a core option and to move other long options exclusively into Hilary term.  

• Different modes of assessment for short options are being considered.  

• It was felt that short options could be non-assessed, and that problem sheets or other formative assessments could be of equal benefit.  

• Syllabi for Differential Equations I and Linear Algebra are being discussed.  

Examinations

• Scaling practices needed to be made simpler to implement and maintain, whilst remaining transparent and clear for students.   

• Scaling practices need to retain an element of academic judgement, and it was agreed that scaling is a necessary process.  

• It was agreed that using previous Part B and C marks to inform scaling was not a favourable process, and that this should be changed in the new examination database.  

• It was broadly felt that Prelims and Part A should have more automated scaling procedures, whilst Part B and C should include more academic judgement. However, there should be a scaling initilisation in Part B and C to help examiners and assessors determine the final scaling map.  

• It is very difficult to determine how this scaling initilisation should be designed so that it is easy to implement and maintain from an IT perspective. There is a tension between this and a mathematical procedure.

Have your say

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