Tokenisation of CUED Supervisions


Key problems with supervision (that I have found):

  • Some supervisors just run through the crib, which is of little benefit, since the crib is usually well-written and understandable. Often if there are any questions where the crib is difficult to understand or wrong, this applies to all students. Often these questions relating to mistakes in the crib are asked on the Moodle forums and get quick answers.

  • Because supervisors have often not looked at the lecture notes, they are sometimes unable to properly answer lecture note specific questions - although it does vary a lot from supervisor to supervisor. I have found that supervisors on the whole are much better at answering questions on the examples paper than the lecture notes. This is not really their fault, they prepare for the examples paper - I think it is more a problem with the overall system.

  • Supervisions can often come at inconvenient times. For example, too long after the content has been covered and hence supervisees have to postpone their questions until the supervision comes around, or they may have forgotten material. Sometimes they happen too short after the content has been covered and hence it is a rush to get the examples paper finished, meaning the student has not had time to prepare good questions and get the most out of the supervision.


I propose a new system that could be rolled out for some modules. This system is not perfect and arguable whether it is better than the current supervision system - limitations I have thought of are listed at the end.


Outline of the system:


  1. Each student is issued with a number of tokens for a given module, with the number proportional to the amount of time they would have spent in supverisions for that module.

    1. Take IIA supervisions for example. Typically have 4 supervisions per module. Let’s assign 1 token per minute of supervision time = 240 tokens per module. However, most often there are 3 supervisees per supervision, hence let’s divide by 3 to give 80 tokens per module = 80 min per student of supervisor time.

  2. All of the supervisors are listed on a page. The students have the capability to either ask questions to any one of these supervisors or schedule a meeting with them. The available times each supervisor is free are listed on the page, making the process of booking in person meetings much easier than back-and-forth email communications and having to coordinate with the other supervisees when they are free.

  3. Each student can either spend their tokens in one of two ways:

    1. Student can ask questions to a supervisor. The supervisor will answer the question (hopefully!) and cost the question in terms of how long it to took them to answer - e.g 10min = 10 tokens. In this way students are not penalised for asking ‘easy’/’basic’ questions at the fear of wasting their tokens instead of spending them on more challenging/thought provoking questions. In this way also supervisors do not have to spend more time than in the previous system answering questions - the total number of minutes ‘spent’ under both systems is the same if students use all their tokens.

    2. Student can schedule an in person meeting with a supervisor, either on their own or with others, at the cost of 1 token per minutes. 

  4. All the questions asked as part of 3)a) will be public and the person asking the question will have the option to anonymise themself (like on Moodle). This would be one of the biggest benefits of the new system. In my opinion, the questions asked on the public forums on the Moodle course pages are often very good and provide interesting insight into the lecture material/EP. The best questions could be prioritised to students through an upvoting system. 


Benefits of the system:

  1. Allows students to ask questions to whichever supervisor they want. Students not penalised by being unlucky and having a ‘worse’ supervisor. Supervisors are incentivised to give the best possible answers to the questions and the best supervisors are rewarded. This is because supervisors receive pay based on final allocation of tokens and so are incentivised to give good answers to questions.

  2. Students do not have to wait until long after the lecture material covered, they can progress at their own pace and ask questions whenever they want.

  3. Students do not have to sit in supervisions that are a waste of time.

  4. Increased use of public forum brings new insight to all students as noted in (4) above.

  5. Supervisors can answer questions whenever they are free and don’t have to schedule one hour blocks.


Limitations (and some potential solutions) to the system:

  1. Supervisors are effectively on a form of zero hours contracts. They might not be happy with this. Solution: hopefully they will appreciate a system that works as more of a meritocracy for better teaching and be incentivised to give good answers to forum questions!

  2. Tutors/DoS’ may be concerned that no longer get supervision reports. Solution: supervision reports do not tend to contain a lot of useful information in my opinion and tutors/DoS’ could check up on their students by by seeing how and where they have spent their tokens. Flag up students who are not spending tokens and ask why.

  3. Some supervisors may be in over demand. Solution: operate an auto market making system, where supervisors higher in demand cost more tokens per min than the base rate and supervisors lower in demand cost less tokens per min than the base rate.

  4. Some supervisors may be more concerned about being wrong in writing than being wrong in a more ‘informal’ setting of a supervision, where their words are not being recorded. Solution: we are all wrong sometimes and hopefully it is not that deep!



Could make the system more complicated, for example by:

  1. Returning tokens to students if their questions are highly upvoted to prioritise good questions. 

  2. Reducing the number of tokens awarded to supervisors if their responses are excessively late (e.g. greater than 5 days).

Don’t think the little benefit these would bring would outweigh the added complexity they bring to the system though.

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