Honours

Policy on the Award of Honours

Preamble

The Policy set out below is based on resolutions of Academic Board flowing from the 1999 Report of the Honours Working Party.

1.  Definition

1.1  The award of honours at UWA results only from successful completion of a degree or, in rare cases, a diploma programme that includes a distinctive dissertation or portfolio based component.  This component trains and assesses students' abilities to contribute to the future development of their disciplines through research that extends existing knowledge and/or through the original and creative application of knowledge in ways likely to impact upon future thinking in their fields of study. (R134/99)

1.2   Where it is desired to recognise overall distinguished performance within a pass degree programme of study that does not contain a research dissertation or portfolio component, the degree may be awarded with "distinction" or with the descriptor "(with honours)" rather than "(Honours)". (R181/99)

1.3   The dissertation/portfolio component of each honours programme must contribute at least 20% towards the final honours grade. (R134/99)

2.   Honours Documentation

2.1 Executive Deans must always hold current copies of the honours documentation provided by departments within their faculties, and provide appropriate guidance to departments to ensure that such documentation includes adequate information concerning course content, structure, assessment/examination/grading, selection/admission, supervision and/or learning outcomes. (134/99) 

2.2   Small departments must ensure that, despite limited numbers of honours students, they provide appropriate documentation concerning course content, structure, assessment/ examination/grading, selection/admission, supervision and learning outcomes. (R134/99)

2.3 Departmental documentation must clearly and accurately convey to students the actual manner in which their work will be assessed and their honours grade assigned.  If departments wish to take flexible account of a variety of factors, then the documentation must indicate the nature of this flexibility and specify what these factors will be, how they will be appraised, and the manner in which they will bear upon the determination of the honours grade. (R134/99)

2.4 Faculties and departments must ensure that the documentation provided to honours students contains appropriate information and advice concerning the acquisition and utilisation of supervision, and clearly indicates the responsibilities of both the student and the supervisor within this relationship. (R134/99)

3.  Benchmarking

At least once during each period between departmental reviews, departments must execute a benchmarking exercise to appraise structure, processes and outcomes associated with its honours programmes.  Documentation of the benchmarking, describing both the procedure adopted and the data yielded by the exercise, must constitute part of each department's review submission, enabling this to be appraised as part of the normal review process.  In the light of this appraisal, the review team will be requested to comment on how the departmental conception of first class work compares against national benchmarks within this discipline. (R92/00)

4.   Assessment of Dissertations

4.1   Honours dissertations must be assessed by at least two markers.  (R134/99)

4.2   The use of an external marker for honours dissertations must be promoted and actively encouraged by faculties when practical. (R136/99)

4.3  Departments must develop and employ a documented set of explicit conceptual criteria to classify their honours dissertations.  Copies of these criteria must be provided to all examiners when any dissertation is assessed.  Copies of the criteria must also be distributed to all students prior to the commencement of their honours studies. (R134/99)

4.4  Departments must have a clear policy concerning the approach that will be taken to resolve any disagreement between dissertation markers.  This policy must include a definition of what will constitute disagreement, and how additional information obtained will be employed to resolve it.  The central goals of this resolution process are to identify, discuss and evaluate those differences of opinion that underpin the disagreement, and to minimise the influence of any input that appears to be based on misconception, or unsustainable argument. (R134/99)

4.5   Whenever possible, departments must follow the desirable practice of excluding supervisors from marking their own students' dissertations.  Supervisors, however, are expected to submit a report outlining their students' demonstrated levels of independence and initiative, and this will be considered when markers assign their grades.  Also, supervisors must be given the opportunity to view and comment upon assessors' reports, before any final grade is assigned, in order to identify and correct possible errors, misunderstandings or oversights. (R138/99)

4.6 If, notwithstanding 4.5, supervisors mark their own students’ dissertations, they must award marks based on the criteria described in 4.3, rather than their personal evaluation of these honours students. (R182/99)

4.7   After assessment of an honours dissertation, the student concerned must be provided with a brief report which outlines the main strengths and weaknesses of the dissertation. (R137/99)

5.   Assessment of Other Honours Programme Components

Departments must ensure that the assessment of all honours coursework components is conducted in a manner consistent with those principles specified within the UWA policy document Minimum Essentials for Good Practice in Assessment. (R134/99)

6. Assignment of Final Honours Grade

6.1   Departments must fully document any procedures that will be followed to assign honours grades, if such grades are not to be entirely determined by students' weighted mean marks. This documentation must make clear both procedural mechanisms and governing principles, and be made available to students. (R134/99)

6.2   The assignment of honours grades must be guided exclusively by the profile of each student's formally assessed performance across those course components explicitly specified as contributing towards the honours grade.  (R134/99)

7.   Equivalent Programmes of Study Available though Different Faculties

7.1 Faculties must specify the latest acceptable honours dissertation submission date for students taking out each of their degrees.  Any department admitting students from different faculties into the same honours programme should then set a single dissertation submission date, that must be no later than the earliest date set by either faculty except with the approval of both Executive Deans.  This departmental submission deadline will then apply to all students taking this honours programme, with penalties for later submission beyond this date being equivalent for students enrolled through either faculty.  (R183/99)

7.2 Whenever differing faculty criteria associated with honours entry result in students who have completed the same programmes of study in a discipline not having the same right of access to a department's honours programme in that discipline, the head of that department must negotiate with both Executive Deans to determine the common set of entry criteria that will apply to all students. Only if such negotiations fail to produce an acceptable resolution to the inequity should these parties then bring the matter to Academic Council, where the issue will be discussed further and resolved.  (R134/99)

7.3 Equity considerations require that students who show the same levels of performance when completing the same honours programme receive the same honours grades regardless of their faculties.  A common scale, as set out below, is therefore employed, within all end-on honours programmes, to demarcate honours grade boundaries in terms of final recorded marks:

First class  80% and above
Upper second class 70% and above
Lower second class 60% and above
Third class  50% and above  (R184/99)

8. Competition for Scholarships

When applications for scholarships are forwarded to departments for assessment, heads of department are requested to provide, where possible, the percentage of the whole mark represented by the dissertation component as well as the mark given for the dissertation.  (R147/00)

[HONOURSPOLICY]
16 January 2001