When one mentions exam time stress, often people think about the anxiety and pressure students face, but few take a moment to consider the stress and pressure that academics, namely Unit Chairs, are faced with when it comes to finalising student results. On top of marking hundreds of exam papers, going through a thorough moderation process, second marking of failed papers, entering the marks into spreadsheets, there is a whole ‘other’ set of processes that must be followed in order to get student results into the University’s Callista Student Management System. Adding to this is the short turnaround time between when students sit their exams to receiving their grades.

Unit Chairs typically only go through this process once or twice per year depending on the number of units they chair. While most have managed in the past themselves, sometimes a little assistance can go a long way.

This trimester the Faculty of Business and Law adopted an improved results finalisation support process to help our academic colleagues. The new results finalisation support process was developed by a multi-disciplinary working party consisting of members from Learning Innovations, Business Services, Data Business Systems and Technical Services and the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning. The improved support process spans over four weeks of support and is available to all academics across the faculty.

The vast majority of results in the Faculty of Business and Law were uploaded between post department ratification meeting and pre-result release. This provided an upload window of 2-3 days’ time. We have had very positive feedback from several of our academic colleagues who have appreciated the dedicated and just-in-time support in working with spreadsheets and uploading of results. Based on the feedback, we will continue to fine-tune the process including refining self-help instructional guides.

The aim of the policy was to provide more structure and clarity surrounding the assistance of uploading results – hopefully this will help ease the burden of Unit Chairs during one of the most stressful times of the teaching trimester.

SUMMARY OF RESULTS UPLOAD ASSISTANCE OVER 2 WEEKS: 

No. of Staff Requiring Assistance	No. of Units being Uploaded	Request via Emails	Requests via Phone	Requests In-Person
67	95	400	90	18

Special thanks to Peter Vuong (Department of Accounting), Luna Lu (Department of Finance), Carolyn Mead (Business Services), Maria Lentini (Learning Innovations) and John King (BL Data Business Systems and Technical Services) for coordinating and pulling all this work together to support our staff with the uploading of results process.