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The higher education sector is increasingly reliant upon casual (‘sessional’) staff for teaching and marking purposes. While this practice has been little examined in the past, over the last few years increasing attention has been paid to the quality of marking, mainly because students and academic staff alike are becoming increasingly likely to question examples of poor practice. Hence, many universities in Australia are now attempting to introduce stricter procedures relating to marking. Despite current concerns, there is little published research on marking practices in Australian universities. This paper adds to the body of knowledge by reporting on two pieces of empirical research into the use of casual markers. A project at Charles Sturt University comprised focus groups of, respectively, students, lecturers and markers, and a survey of distance education students. Research at the University of South Australia focused on pedagogical issues relating to marking, comparing the approaches of permanent lecturing staff with those of sessional markers. The results of these projects provide a useful insight into areas of current concern to university staff and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That Australian universities value the development of qualities broadly related to ethics is evidenced through their inclusion in institutional statements of graduate attributes (GA). Early GA implementation strategies largely emphasised the mapping of specific attributes against existing programmes or courses. There is now a growing acknowledgement that authentic implementation does not occur unless GAs are embedded in assessment. The assessment of GAs is a problematic and challenging task, a situation attributed partly to difficulties in conceptualising GAs in ways that facilitate their operationalisation in teaching and assessment and partly to inadequacies in the development of assessment strategies and instruments. For many academics, the moral dimension of ethics so intensifies the assessment challenge that they are often not assessed at all. While these difficulties are acknowledged, this paper argues the case for the explicit inclusion of ethics in course teaching and assessment plans and illustrates some of the contexts, including the student university learning experience, in which the development and assessment of ethics can be undertaken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]