This year Trinity’s History Department has changed its cover sheet to mean that students no longer are required to state their name when submitting work.
When submitting a piece of written work to a humanities department, a student must add the correct cover sheet for their department and year group. Students typically fill out these cover sheets to include information about who the student is – typically this means including their name and student number, as well as information about the module they are submitting their work for, such as the module name and number and who the module supervisor is.
This decision by the History Department means that students’ work will be marked anonymously by them as the only identifying factor of the work they have submitted is their student number.
When reached for comment about why this change had been made, Joseph Clarke, Head of Department for History, told the University Times that, “This change to the essay cover sheets is to ensure that every aspect of the assessment process, from the initial student submission to the final publication of marks, is fully aligned with College’s policy on anonymous marking for moderatorship work.”
Though the College instituted a policy on anonymous marking for moderatorship last year, other departments have not taken the decision to remove the requirement for students to put their names on submitted work. For instance, among others, Classics, English, Global Business and Psychology departments all still require students to state their names when submitting work. It is unclear how these departments make the marking system anonymous after students submit their written work with their name on the cover sheet.
The idea behind this policy of anonymous marking is to promote equality and transparency in education as, in theory, it removes any assumptions that the person marking the work could make based on the name of the student. It should mean that students’ work is marked purely on the merits of the work itself. Nevertheless, how effective this policy actually is remains an ongoing debate among education experts.
