An example of how to do validation badly

A very simple kind of validation is review by staff meeting, also known as peer review. While this approach can be done well, it can also be done poorly:

Alex was the only lecturer in literature in the college, so he was always assigned to teach and assess all literature units by himself. That put him in a difficult situation; the standards meant only what he said they meant so his assessments were biased to his personal literary opinions. And if he became stuck, he had nobody to ask.

Last semester, some of Alex’s students thought several assessments were quite unfair, and many good students performed very poorly. Although they mentioned this in feedback, Alex thought that it was because they hadn’t really got several important points. So he suggested no changes.

When review came up, he usually got the final say because other lecturers didn’t know enough about his field to suggest anything different. For the most part, staff meetings were not much more than a time of saying “Yes, we’re happy with what we do” and validation reports more-or-less said just that.