In the UK, Universities like that in London of which Birkbeck College is a part, all have power to award degrees. This power is granted to them directly by the authority of our Parliament. This implies that we are trusted to maintain the quality and rigour of our awards and that we have in place mechanisms to ensure that this is so. In turn this reports to the governing body of the College and University. Essentially, all are there to see 'fair play exists'.
All students have a right to appeal decisions to successively higher authority.
All courses have External Examiners who are independent of the University and who help in setting the examinations, check on the marking standards, and make suggestions for improvements both to the examinations and to the course as a whole. A major consideration for these External Examiners is to ensure comparability of degree standards between institutions. Peter is currently editor of the International Journal of Geographic Information Science and he teaches on an MSc course in GISc at Leicester. Tony has enormous experience of using GIS and remote sensing in developing countries and teaches on our regular MSc in GISc course, which we share with a number of London University's Colleges. The result of all this is that degrees awarded by UK Universities have a very high reputation for quality, and our aim is to keep it that way.