A college lecturer has admitted submitting grades for students to be sent to the exam board when their work did not justify the marks. Some students on law lecturer Mark Gorman's course at Coleg y Cymoedd had not completed a single assignment, a professional standards hearing was told.
Despite this, Mr Gorman submitted grades, including distinctions and merits, to the college to hand on to the OCR exam board, the Education Workforce Council Wales panel heard. Mr Gorman, an experienced lecturer, awarded some of his students top merits and distinctions when the work was not there to justify those grades, the panel heard.
Investigation impact on students
When an investigation was launched, his students were told they did not have the grades they thought they had achieved for the full A level equivalent course, which they needed to apply to university. This included some students who planned to apply to top Russell Group universities but now did not have the grades to do so, the panel was told.
Students had to come back into college to re-do the work and be re-assessed to get the marks. It was only thanks to other staff stepping in to re-teach and assess them that no students were disadvantaged, the panel was told.
Details of the allegations
Mr Gorman taught on an A level equivalent course at Coleg y Cymoedd as part of an access to higher education qualification, run by the OCR board. Units on law were part of that qualification, which enabled students without A levels to apply to university if they got certain grades.
As well as handing in grades that were not justified, the lecturer, who had worked for years at the college's Nantgarw and Ystrad Mynach campuses, admitted he did not tell colleagues that his students had not handed in work, or all parts of their assessments, for the law units he taught towards the university access course.
Appearing before the committee, Mr Gorman also admitted an allegation that he used an out-of-date specification when teaching the criminal law unit of the Access to Higher Education Humanities and Social Science qualification at Coleg y Cymoedd between around February 2024 and May 2024. The lecturer also admitted not maintaining adequate systems for storing and retrieving students' work on the business ethics and/or criminal law units, between around September 2023 and April 2024, in that he was unable to provide their work promptly when asked.
Hearing evidence and testimony
Mr Gorman admitted the EWC's allegation that this amounts to unacceptable professional conduct, but only in relation to submitting grades not justified. He also denies a further allegation that his admitted actions were dishonest or lacking in integrity.
The lecturer's line manager, Dean Howells, told the second day of the hearing on November 3 that specifications for the course had changed. Mr Gorman had been sent an email advising him of this change in June 2023, well ahead of teaching starting in the new academic year in September. Mr Gorman's barrister, Amelia Clegg, said one email was insufficient.
Mr Howells agreed with Ms Clegg that he was responsible for managing Mr Gorman and for his professional training and development. But he said the specification changes were not so complex that training was needed. He said development would have been available "if Mark had reached out".
But Ms Clegg told the committee: "Support was not sufficient on the basis of one email to several staff members with no internal training. More could have been done in respect to that new specification." She said the onus to offer support for any changes was on Mr Howells as manager and not her client.
Mr Howells disagreed, telling her: "I don't think Mark would have required training because the change was around assessment and not delivery." Asked whether the college had brought in any policy changes around changes in specifications as a result of this case, Mr Howells said it had not.
Asked by the panel whether another member of staff, Laura O'Connell, as internal verifier, should have flagged that she had not received work as expected from Mr Gorman's criminal law unit, Mr Howell added: "The onus is on the assessor to produce the work."
Panel member Andy Liptrot asked: "Why do you think this all went wrong?" Mr Howells replied that the law lecturer had not marked students' work as required. He said: "Mark was not marking as he should have. A mark sheet should have been passed on so a sample could be compared." He added: "What's gone wrong is work not marked on time. Whether Mark was allowing them extra time I don't know."
The panel was told that Mr Gorman had worked at the college from the Nantgarw and Ystrad Mynach campuses for "many years" and had a previous good history working there until these incidents. Asked about the law units, the panel was told that Coleg y Cymoedd does not have a law department. The college has "schools". Mr Howell runs the Applied Science and Business School, which has one full-time lecturer teaching A level law, and they also used to run the Access to Humanities course, which included the law module Mr Gorman taught.
A number of witness statements were read out to the hearing. These included staff saying that Mr Gorman had submitted the top distinction and merit grades where it was not justified and "some learners had not completed a single assignment". The panel was told that it was only thanks to the help of other staff, who stepped in to teach and assess Mr Gorman's students again, that none were disadvantaged. "They were not disadvantaged as other staff picked up the workload," the panel heard.
The committee heard that one colleague described Mr Gorman as "a pleasant and intelligent man" and another said the lecturer had cried when he was questioned about grades he had awarded and about evidencing the assessments. The hearing continues.
