Meet our latest Wow winners...

This month we're celebrating an incredible team from Student Administrative Services. Their Warwick Wow Award recognises the hard work and meticulous planning that goes into delivering exams for our huge student population.

Want to say well done? Log in to congratulate our winning colleagues in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

Nominations still open

Do you know another team or project that deserves recognition? The Wonders and Wows awards are open for nominations until Tuesday 25 March.

Modules, Marks and Assessment Team, Student Administrative Services

Did you know Warwick had over 80,000 exam sittings last academic year, at 17 different venues? This is thanks to Jo Latimer's team, who manage centrally scheduled exams and data operations, while supporting staff and students across 38 academic departments.

Despite facing challenges like industrial action, a major software change, and managing both physical and online exams, they have performed exceptionally well.

The team went beyond their usual duties to make sure exams ran smoothly. They managed to balance regular tasks with unexpected projects, receiving positive feedback for their efforts. Their work makes sure students end up in the right room, with the right paper and the right stationery, which is often taken for granted.

They also made the move to a new scheduling software without disrupting services. "The team (together with key IDG staff) managed to achieve this, and it's testimony to their success that it has been largely invisible to the rest of the University."

Transcript

Professor Stuart Croft: For our Wow award today, we're here in the Junction to see the Modules, Marks and Assessment team who do incredible work, mostly behind the scenes to support our students with timetable and exams and marks and all that really important work that helps our students get the degrees that they deserve. It's a wonderful team who have worked through so many changes over the last few years through covid, through the hybrid processes of examinations that we do now, through big technological changes with new systems that brought in, and they worked their way through that with professionalism and positivity and quite a lot of joy. So let's go and give our Wow award to this wonderful team.

Hello. You've got visitors. You've got visitors. Do you know why you've got visitors? We are going around giving out the Wows and Wonders to the wonderful people who do things that not necessarily the majority of people in the institution know about. And guess what? Oh, Come on. Help me. Help me. Yeah. Yeah. You have been nominated. Yeah. And you have won as a team for the amazing work that you do.

We were just saying on the way in, the great thing is that for most students, they should not know should, they should have no sort of sense that you even exist. But of course, if you didn't exist, then they wouldn't be getting assessed and they wouldn't be getting marks and they wouldn't be getting degrees, and they wouldn't be getting any of those great positive things. And you all, as a team, have had to go through quite a lot of changes. IT changes in terms of the software as well, and quite a lot of additional students coming through. And now we do all this hybrid stuff in terms of assessment, don't we? It's not all as straightforward as it used to be a few years ago.

And we did have this industrial election of course, as well, which was a moment of complexity and challenge for everybody, but certainly would be for you in terms of getting things through. So this is the moment just to say thank you, you've been brilliant, and you've all gone super quiet and that's terrible. Super quiet is a terrible thing.

Oh, look at this! Now it's not just warm words because you get things, the first thing you get is a certificate, which has to be shared across the whole team and treasured forever and, and, and, you know, handed down through the generations. You know, this is what good looks like. So there's the, the first piece. How does, how does everybody know that you are stars? Because we give you a star to say how fabulous, how fabulous you all are, and you are sitting there. So therefore you have the joy of the first owner of this. How are things going this year?

Jo Latimer: Great. Great.

Stuart: Thank you all. Thank you.

The nominators told us:

"I've recently been working with the team... and I now understand the enormous level of complexity this relatively small team have to deal with, trying their very hardest to accommodate the different requirements and desires of different departments, following individual students' religious observances, and ensuring invigilators and porters have all the information they need for exams to go smoothly."

"I don't think I need to stress how critical this process is, without exams running smoothly the student lifecycle would be hugely impacted... The team remain friendly and approachable despite being under a lot of pressure."

Comments for Meet our latest Wow winners...

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Fiona Robertson 13 March 2025 08:13

Huge congratulations to Jo and Helen and everyone else involved! Very well deserved and it’s been great working with you over the last couple of years. Best wishes, Fiona
Andrew McGwinn 13 March 2025 12:47

Well done all – much deserved!