The Evaluation Practice at a Sino-British University

As an institution, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University (XJTLU) is unique in China. It is the only Chinese institution that awards students both UK degree and Chinese degree, so it has two sets of control, one of which is to meet all the requirements of the UK Higher Education (HE) standards and the other is to go through all the requirements of Chinese degree awarding powers. Due to its specific relationship with University of Liverpool (UoL), XJTLU is also under close scrutiny from UoL. All of these are reflected in the XJTLU internal and external Quality Assurance (QA) frameworks and procedures. This article focuses on describing and analysing how XJTLU monitors the teaching and assessment processes to meet the UK HE QA standards. Generally, the monitoring system is robust and multidimensional, involving students and peers as observers/reviewers. To understand students’ perspectives on the teaching quality and their learning experience, the university provides official channels for students to provide ratings and/ or qualitative comments on modules and instructors at the middle and the end of semester, while module instructors are expected to do reflection and revision of their teaching accordingly. In addition to that, each module instructor has to observe a peer’s class annually and engage in dialogues with the peer reviewer before and after the observation. To ensure the quality of assessment tasks and marking standards, module leaders have to actively communicate with internal moderators, UoL moderators and external moderators in the Assessment Preparation Review (APR) and Marking Moderation Review (MMR) processes. In general, the evaluation practice of teaching and assessment plays an important role in ensuring the educational quality is maintained and enhanced at XJTLU and is comparable with international best practice. So far, many disciplines at the university have been certified by international professional organizations,which strengthens the university’s global positioning, and directly improves the competitiveness of graduates in the global job market. The author hopes to provide some insights of the QA practice at XJTLU to help teachers and education administrators in different contexts to understand the benefits and progress to be made in terms of teaching and assessment evaluation to ensure the high quality of student training.