Exams and Feedback FAQs

The best place for feedback is a lecturer's office hours. You can find these on the course Blackboard page.

We have recently updated our student feedback section of the website. We've split feedback into two sections: "for students" and "by students" to help you find the information you want.

If you have any questions about academic feedback, please contact Yasmin Andrew.

Transcripts are available from the Student Records Office in Registry.  You can either visit the Student Hub on Level 3 of the Sherfield Building or make the request via My Imperial (My Document). 

In general you are allowed two attempts to resit an exam or resubmit an assessment for any failed module, which must be taken at the next two available opportunities.  Normally the maximum mark that can be credited from a resit is the pass mark, unless you were absent from the original exam due to medically certified illness in which case a Full Credit Resit is usually granted. 

Note that Compulsory and Elective modules can be 'compensated'. This means that a mark of 30-39.99% for FHEQ 4, 5 and 6 modules, and 40.49.99% for FHEQ 7 modules will stand and a student can carry this compensated fail to graduate or progress into the followiing year.

There are regulations about resits and compensation provided by Registry.

Currently all year cohorts have a first exam resit opportunity provided between mid and late August. The exam timetable will be published by the Exams Officer closer to the time of the exam.  For any modules which remain failed or not compensated following the September Board meeting, students must go on an academic interruption and have a second and final attempt the following summer. 

This is only possible in very exceptional circumstances. You must speak to the Senior Tutor if you wish to do this. Otherwise you must take your resit or deferred exams at Imperial College in London.

You will be able to look up your marks on My Imperial by late September. 

The College policy on Mitigating Circumstances is available online

If you have any reason to believe that your performance in a particular examination or set of examinations has been or is likely to be affected by any extenuating circumstances, please be sure to fill in the appropriate form and send it to the Senior Tutor. If possible, you should meet with your personal tutor or the Senior Tutor to discuss this. Note, a request for mitigation form can be submitted at any time if you feel your work has been affected over an extended period – the forms are not exclusively for use around examination times. If however your request for mitigation is clearly with regard to a particular examination or set of examinations then please note that you are required to submit the form within 10 days of the affected examination(s). The college policy could cover e.g. illness (physical or mental), injury,  bereavement or serious illness of a family member. This list is not exhaustive - if you are not sure whether your personal circumstances fall under the remit of the college’s policy on extenuating circumstances or if you have any other queries please contact the Senior Tutor, Dr. Sebastien Guenneau, to arrange a meeting.

For some assessments, there will be a resubmission opportunity. It is also possible to carry a compensated pass for compulsory and elective modules. 

Marking of examination papers takes two to four weeks, depending on the number of scripts, since each script is second marked and data is independently entered and compared to minimise the possibility of arithmetical errors. At the end of June/beginning of July, the provisional list of third and fourth year marks is submitted to the Board of Examiners which includes all teaching staff members, project supervisors, personal and academic tutors. The Board pays particular attention to those students whose marks are close to the degree class borderlines. The department's External Examiners review the scripts and projects of those students put forward by the board of examiners. 

The final board of examiners meeting takes place approximately two weeks after the end of term. Results continue to be checked for another week or so before being sent to Registry for publication. 
Registry controls the release of all official examination marks.  You will be able to access these online usually by the end of July. Neither the Undergraduate teaching team, nor your Personal Tutors have the authority to release results to you before Registry and asking merely delays the process.

If your performance is below that required for progression (60% year 1 and 2 average mark), you will receive an email from the department informing you that you have been automatically transferred to the BSc (F300) degree programme. You should receive this email by the end of July. 

This is unlikely unless you can provide some evidence of extenuating circumstances. Any extenuating circumstances should already have been brought to the attention of your Personal Tutor or the Senior Tutor before the Mitigation Advisory Panel meeting.  One of the key tasks of this meeting is to discuss issues that may have had a negative impact on a student's performance and to determine whether that student is ultimately capable of obtaining an upper second class MSci degree.

We make exams solutions available every three years and only three sets of solutions are avialable online. The latest set of solutions can be found here.

Once the examination results have been published on My Imperial, the Department and College have mechanisms in place should you feel that you require additional feedback, guidance or wish to appeal.

Personal Tutor or Senior Tutor

Firstly, for general academic guidance please approach your Personal Tutor. If you have mitigating circumstances or require further support, please consult the Senior Tutor. The Senior Tutor may also be able to advise you on the processes below.

Exam Feedback Reports
All lecturers are required to provide a general feedback on how students performed on the exam. This general feedback will highlight areas of the exam that students found difficult with guidance on how the question should have been answered. The feedback is posted on the department's website. 

Arithmetical Mark Check

Students have 10 working days after their results are released to request an arithmetic check. Contact Victor Urubusi, v.urubusi@imperial.ac.uk, with your name, CID and which exam(s) you would like to request an arithmetic check for. You will also need to provide a reason for the arithmetic check. 

Comments from Examination Scripts

In accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018, information recorded on examination scripts by students during an examination is exempt from subject access. However, students are entitled to information about their marks for both coursework and examinations. Therefore, students have a right to request a copy or summary "in an intelligible form" of any comments made on an examination script by an examiner.

This means that it is not possible to view your original scripts, or copies of the scripts, but a transcript of comments from the markers can be produced for your use. Please send an email to subjectaccess@imperial.ac.uk to request a transcript of comments. 

We do not release partial results for an exam. The overall mark for the exam is an indication of how you have performed as a whole. You are encouraged to review the general feedback provided after the main exam period. You should use the feedback provided, normally posted on the department website, as a tool to help you understand your overall result.

All exam scripts are marked independently by a first and second marker and the marks are collated by one of the academics. Once this process has been completed, the marks are entered into the exam database by an administrator and this is cross-referenced against the marks entered by the academic using an error checking software. 

No. All exams are marked twice and a number of checks are in place to avoid errors. Marks shown on the exam paper are indicative, and not definitive, of those that the markers anticipate assigning. Furthermore, markers are also asked to moderate their exams to ensure that the average, the number of first class marks and the number of fails are within the expected range. To achieve this, the indicative marks for parts of an exam may change slightly. Where the overall exam results still significantly deviates from the expected results, scaling is applied to the exam results. The scaling procedure, similar to moderation, focuses on the average, the number of fails and the number of first class marks. Further information about scaling can be found here (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/physics/dugs/ExamStats/index.php).

No

Registry will inform you when your results are available on My Imperial. 

All degree average marks that are close to the boundary for a higher classification are reviewed. The Board of Examiners, including external examiners, review your performance to date and a final decision is made at the final examiners' meeting.

Students should make the request in writing, and it must be within 10 working days of the publication of results. To request an arithmetic check, complete the Arithmetic Check Form and send it by email to Victor Urubusi, v.urubusi@imperial.ac.uk. ‌

You can appeal the decision of the Board of Examiners by completing a form provided by the Registry. The Registry website has a section on appeals, including a link to the form.

After the exams the scripts are marked by two academics.  The script marks are independently entered into a spreadsheet to compare with the final marks noted by the academics.  These checks ensure that there are no arithmetic errors in the final marks before they are reported to the Exam Board for ratification.  To help students better understand the marks awarded, the question setters/markers are asked to provide general feedback of how students answered the exam questions.  All the general exam feedback is posted online on the Physics Department’s website. In addition to the exam feedback, the Department also publishes a histogram showing the mark distribution and the effects of any scaling applied to the module marks.  

As a result of this thorough process and the information provided to students after marking, the Department does not allow students to view marked scripts. Students can’t request a remark or appeal academic judgement.

If a student thinks there’s a procedural error, they can request an arithmetic check.  An arithmetic check involves inspecting every page of the student’s exam scripts to ensure that there is evidence of marking on each one, that the marks have been added up correctly and that the total marks, taking into account any scaling, matches what has been published on My Imperial.

The Department publishes the solutions for the summer exams every three years and three sets of solutions are made available to students each year.  This is a Teaching Committee decision.  

While there is an understandable desire of students to have solutions to all years’ exams, the Department has decided against that. The undergraduate physics examinations are designed as a method of testing students’ ability under examination conditions; they require students to revise and prepare to succeed in their current format.  Examination questions are also designed to deepen student learning with regard to a particular module.  If model answers were published for all past papers, they would likely to be utilised by students as an alternative to undertaking conventional revision for examinations. Preparation for examinations using exam solutions would not provide adequate depth of learning and would not improve a student’s technical knowledge.

In addition, since model solutions are intended as guidelines only; they are not intended to be comprehensive answers to exam questions. Due to the process by which these solutions are compiled, it is unavoidable that there will be a few cases for which the model answer given here does not match the question asked in the final form of the examination paper. 

Academic markers would also be unable to obtain an accurate picture of a particular student’s learning ability, improvement, and overall knowledge if students were heavily reliant on past model answers as part of their exam preparation.

The resit exam dates are published in advance, normally at the same time as the summer exam timetable, and you are expected to be available during this period. The exam can't be moved to another day.