Questions from Students

Staff should respond to specific questions from students about material in their module. It is important to avoid giving a lot of help to some students but not to others. One approach is to post the question(s) asked by students, together with the response, on the module forum (all moodle homepages have a module forum). Care should be taken not to reveal the identity of the student asking the question.

Revision Lectures

The Department does not schedule revision lectures. In the final scheduled lecture of a module some staff may summarise the main themes, but should not try to re-teach the whole module. Staff should not offer an additional lecture in which they select the topics to be covered. Any choice of topics is liable to be interpreted as an indication of what is in the exam. If this led to a complaint from a student, who did not pick up on this hint or who was not at the session, it would be difficult to defend what the lecturer had done.

Question and Answer Sessions

Sometimes a student, eg from PhysSoc, may approach the module leader on behalf of other students and present a list of questions they want to go over. In such cases, it may be appropriate to organise a session in a lecture room or online to go through the topics raised. Staff are not obliged to do this but, if they do, they should:

• Ensure that all students registered for the module are made aware of the session beforehand;
• Aim to have the session recorded. Even though the majority of students should be free, a minority of students may have other commitments, such as language examinations in week 3 of term 3 or an interview, and may not be able to attend;
• Avoid saying anything which can be taken as a hint about the exam. For example, a comment like "X is technical and I won't go over X, but I will look in a bit more detail at Y" could be taken to mean X is not in the exam but Y probably is.

Our preferred alternative to face-to-face or live online sessions is to provide written answers to the list of questions and post them on the module forum. (Students are automatically informed of new posts to your module forum.)