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We work in partnership with UCL Student Success Team who lead on the design, development and implementation of UCL’s strategies to support academic success and close awarding and retention gaps across UCL. Dr Tamara Alhilfi is the Student Success Faculty Lead for the MAPS Faculty and is the first point of contact for departments with respect to Awarding Gap projects.
In MAPS we take the approach of encouraging Inclusive Curriculum design. This means that we consider potential barriers to students accessing and engaging with their studies and take steps, within the design of the curriculum, to eliminate these barriers. These actions could include:
- Improving the clarity of communications to students.
- Avoiding jargon and defining technical terms and acronyms more clearly.
- Providing information about course changes as early and clearly as possible.
All of the actions listed in the toolkit will improve the education experience for all of our students, with the aim of levelling the playing field to allow equal opportunities for all. See also our related project on Addressing the Expectation Gap.
Other Awarding Gap work undertaken in the faculty includes:
- Group coaching programme for BAME students in collaboration with UMO.
- MAPS Summer Research Internships with ring-fenced opportunities for Widening Participation and BAME students.
- Establishment of expectations for support for exam preparation with agreed faculty principles for access to past exam papers (see Feedback and Assessment project).
- An agreed faculty position that assessment deadlines should always fall within termtime and within standard working hours (with the exception of some fieldwork activities).
- Seminars and forums to exchange good practice in Inclusive Curriculum design (see Seminars, Forums and Events page).
- Bespoke BAME Awarding Gap Toolkits provided to departments with module level data, suggested areas of focus and examples of good practice in the faculty.
