Benefits of the Examination Board Platform in SITS/e:Vision

For Faculties:

• Faster Turnaround: Automated processes will allow students to progress through their course journey more quickly, reducing administrative delays that currently impact progression and award timelines.
• Greater Visibility: Real-time dashboards will provide academics and board Chairs with direct access to up-to-date data on board status, readiness, and student outcomes. Students requiring additional support can be identified earlier and through self-service dashboards.
• Reduced Dependency on Administrative Teams: Faculties and academics will be able to self-serve critical information without relying on manual reporting or administrative interventions.

Operational and Strategic Benefits

The new platform delivers significant benefits by addressing existing risks and inefficiencies:

• Improved Accuracy: Automated outcome calculations will significantly reduce errors, removing the need for manual outcome checks and corrections by administrators.
• Faster Turnaround: Streamlines ratification and release of student results, enabling students to progress without delays.
• Enhanced Student Experience: Students will receive their results automatically and much earlier than they do now. Given the accuracy of the calculations, we expect to receive many fewer appeals. Students will be identified earlier for extra support should they need. They'll be able to access the next stage of their learning earlier and where being awarded, move on to the next stage of their lives as UoB graduates without any administrative delays.
• Reduced Administrative Effort: Manual processes will be replaced by automated workflows, freeing up staff resources and supporting operational teams.

We’ve introduced the following features:

• Students are automatically assigned to Exam Boards, previously administrative staff had to do this manually.
  
  
• Outcome calculations are automated. We’ve replaced the old algorithms which frequently generated incorrect results for 50-90% of student records meaning that our administrators had to manually check and revise the outcomes for students. The platform now encodes our Academic Regulations (and variances where possible) to calculate outcomes based on the marks entered by academic staff. Based on calculations for the first Exam Board period, the percentage of students for whom outcomes fail to calculate has been reduced to under 0.05% meaning outcomes are calculating for over 99.95% of students at upcoming boards. We are checking the new platform calculations to assure ourselves that all is working correctly and will continue to do this for the next year. If you spot anything do let your Board Secretary know and we’ll cross check it with what we’re looking at.
  
  
• Real Time e:Vision dashboards – We now have role based dashboards for Chairs, Secretaries, Course Leaders, Unit Co-ordinators and Administrators, all of whom will have real-time self-service access to check:
  • Assessment Readiness for Boards,
  • Exam Board status
  • Calculated outcomes (anonymised)
  • Number of Chairs’ Actions for post-Board processing

  Academic staff will have a clear up to date view of Board preparations without needing to go through administrators or multiple email exchanges.

• Board administration is improved with the online platform. The automation adds all students and staff to boards, Board Secretaries can add additional staff and students to Boards if required. The platform allows online convening through e:Vision providing online student profiles. We will move to anonymised student profiles reflecting best practice in the rest of the sector. It replaces the old ‘Access Stats’ functionality and removes the need to manually generate large volumes of PDFs.
  
  
• We have automated Post Board updates – Student records (across multiple SITS tables) are now updated automatically with the Exam Board outcomes. Outcomes will be updated on the evening of an Exam Board being signed off. This eases a major bottleneck and allows students to progress much more quickly.
  
  
• Release of results is now automated – Once the post Board updates are complete the results are released, students are sent emails automatically and sign-posted to e:Vision to view their results in real-time rather than being sent long emails.
  
  
• Scheme Boards are no longer necessary – with the enhanced accuracy both in terms of making sure that all students are assigned to a Board and with accurate calculation of marks. Again, this means we’ll be able to award students much more quickly.