ABSTRACT
This is one of two final ‘catch-all’ questions about the course. In one way, results provide the most obvious indicator of the success of a course, and likewise the most obvious indication of problems or trouble. However, it is not always easy to know what results should be attributed to: Good or poor selection of students? Good or poor motivation? A good or poor learning environment? Good or poor teaching? One teacher or another? Appropriate or inappropriate assessment? Rising or falling standards? The question also raises the issue of expectations. What do you count as ‘good’? Are your expectations too low? Are they unreasonably high? Have you settled into a certain set of assumptions-perhaps even self-fulfilling prophecies-that relate to certain types or groups of students? And what do the students expect of themselves? It is not possible to suggest all the ramifications of this question here. Only you can explore it, analysing the pattern of results (perhaps over time and across institutions) and if necessary tracing the diagnosis back to some of the issues raised in previous sections in this and the first chapter. Likewise, only you can come up with potential solutions in the light of that analysis, solutions that may relate not just to one but to several aspects of the work. If your course is not formally assessed at all, you will need to identify some other measure of performance or achievement that you can use instead.
