Senior School Now Officially Recommends Submission of All Assessments as MP3 Files

In a memo circulated to staff and students on Monday, the Director of Learning announced that the Senior School now formally recommends the submission of all assessment tasks — essays, reports, source analyses, and major works — as MP3 audio files.

The recommendation is, the memo stresses, "strong, but not, at this stage, mandatory". Students may continue to submit written work in PDF or DOCX format. Students who do so should expect, however, what the memo describes as "a marginally less enthusiastic reception".

Staff have been provided with guidance on how to receive, mark, and store MP3 submissions. Marking will be conducted via headphones, in offices, with what one Head of Faculty described as "the door firmly closed".

Recommended bitrate is 192 kbps. Recommended length, for a Module B essay, is between fourteen and twenty-two minutes. Recommended tone is "sincere". Background music is permitted but, the memo notes, "will be considered".

Students concerned about the policy are reminded that they retain the right to submit in writing. Staff concerned about the policy are reminded that the document is described, throughout, as a "recommendation", and that the school reserves the right to revisit the recommendation in light of community feedback, which has been described in early returns as "voluminous".

iCentral has confirmed that the school's learning management system can accept MP3 uploads up to 80MB. Files exceeding this limit should be split, named clearly, and submitted in sequence. Files submitted as a single eighty-minute monologue will be marked, but, iCentral stresses, "with feeling".