Lecturer claims he was called ‘trouble-maker’ over grades

A lecturer has told a High Court jury that relations in his college became toxic after he objected to alleged “grade inflation” of student marks.

He was labelled a "trouble-maker", Keith Maycock said.

Mr Maycock, a computer science lecturer at the National College of Ireland (NCI), based in the IFSC, Dublin, claims he was defamed in a letter sent to about 100 students almost 18 months after he raised concerns about grade inflation.

The February 2015 email letter sent to school of computing students, which described as “inappropriate” an examination project for a module designed by Mr Maycock, and which had produced very low results, was defamatory of him, he said.

The email meant he was not able to do his job and damaged his reputation among students and the wider college community, he said

The NCI denies his claims, made in an action which opened on Friday before Mr Justice Bernard Barton and a jury.

In evidence, Mr Maycock said the letter arose after he raised concerns students lacked a basic understanding of a computer language taught to them in first year. This was a third-year project in the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course and a large number of students displayed a lack of basic understanding of a computer language, Java, when they completed projects for assessment, he said.

External examiner

After discussing the matter with an external examiner, he proposed students be allowed resubmit their projects after supports to help them bridge the gaps in their knowledge were put in place.

Without consultation with him, a letter was sent by the school of computing to about 100 students, and posted briefly on the college portal, stating marks for the project had been withheld as an external examiner considered the project not appropriate for that module of the course, he said.

The students were told they could submit a new project or keep the mark they got and the letter apologised it had been necessary to put these steps in place.

Mr Maycock said the external examiner had complimented him on the design of the course module and suggestions by the college it was inappropriate were untrue.

Earlier, Mr Maycock, a father of four who lives in Mullingar and joined NCI as a lecturer in 2007, said, 18 months earlier, he had objected to what he saw as grade inflation in marks for a cloud computing* course he had developed.

In October 2013, an external examiner approached him with concerns about a large batch of dissertations given very high marks in that course.

After reviewing them, Mr Maycock found a lot of elements one would expect in those papers were simply not there, including lack of research questions, literature researched or methodology.

High grade

When he asked an independent colleague to mark one dissertation, which had got a first grade of 74 per cent grade, the colleague marked the paper at 26 per cent, a fail.

He brought his concerns to the attention of the head of the school who responded he wanted to submit the results (to the exam board) as they were because he “did not want the students to suffer”, Mr Maycock said.

The response from the director of cloud computing was “quite aggressive”, he said. The director said he had noticed the problem two weeks earlier and had a meeting with the exam board about it.

A few days later, he became aware the college had decided to mark down all the dissertations by 10 per cent, he said. He regarded that as fundamentally wrong as he had seen the dissertations himself and this was not something he was prepared to sign off on, he said.

“I did not want to be associated with grade inflation, awarding extremely high marks that were not deserved.”

A lot of the students involved were international, he said.

He also said the college’s head of quality assurance told him: “I cannot believe you tried to prove grade inflation.”

As a result of all this, he said he was “labelled a trouble-maker” at a meeting in November and was later removed from a programme he developed and from supervising dissertations. He had not marked a dissertation since and his relationships in the college throughout 2014 and 2015 were “really toxic”.

The case resumes on Tuesday.

*This article was amended on June 1st, 2017