Members and other visitors to our website may find it helpful if from time to time you heard from one of the management team at the ACT about activities in their particular area. To kick this off I asked Yvonne Dineen, our Education Operations Manager, to contribute this month’s column. She writes:
Browsing through the Annual Review, you will have seen pictured on page 5, two students with the best results in the Business Law and Advanced Funding and Risk Management papers receiving their prizes at the 2004 Conferment Ceremony.
The ceremony’s celebrations are the visible outcome of the great efforts made by AMCT and Cert ICM students and Associate Members tackling MCT. From the point of view of the Education Team at the ACT, the ceremony represents the high point of a calendar of activities which, though sometimes unseen, play a key part in the success of our students and thus the progress of the profession.
Throughout October and November, for example, the ACT’s examining team will be working its way diligently through over 900 scripts completed in October’s examinations. To reach this point, the professional team, which comprises academics and ACT practitioner members, will have drafted, exhaustively reviewed and had externally tested the papers that students sit, then the Chief Examiners will have rigorously ensured that marking teams are marking to the same standard, and finally, scrutinised all results in the greatest detail to ensure fairness to all students.
Coordinating the examinations from the office is another challenge. This October, the ACT’s examinations took place in the familiar setting of the Bishopsgate Institute, but also in 39 countries outside the UK. The furthest away was Australia, but perhaps the furthest off the beaten track was Eritrea. To make such a complex operation work effectively requires a true understanding of the concept of a deadline on the part of the office exams personnel, Natalie Eggins and Britta Bishop!
There is the briefest of breathing spaces between the results of one sitting, and the arrangements for tuition and revision leading to the next. Recently many of you kindly took the time to respond to the Education Department’s questionnaire in which we sought your views on the teaching provided for AMCT examinations. The results of the questionnaire give us comfort that the strategy adopted over the past few years, to increase the amount of tuition and revision on offer, and, where possible, to offer a choice of dates, is the correct one. In addition, your feedback will help us develop an even more customer-focused tuition programme.
The administration and development of tuition is a core activity for the Education team, but the course is essentially a flexible one, capable of being studied by distance learning. Unusually for a professional body, we take enrolments on an all-year round basis. The indispensable work of enrolment and responding to student enquiries, carried out in the main by Andy Swallow and Costas Dakoutros, is the bedrock of the operation, not least at this time of the year, as we prepare for the large number of enrolments leading up to the November deadline for the April 2005 examination, and the beginning of another examinations cycle. Richard Raeburn
Chief Executive |
