I was recently asked to be a moderator for the BCGD degree projects at Waikato University, which was branded this year as "Eclectric". When I arrived I only had a very vague idea of what I'd actually be doing as a moderator, as I have no formal design training.
I soon learned that the idea is to give students feedback from people working in the industry, and to advise the University on things in their course that are out of date, or could be added to their curriculum.
Each moderator gets 6 or 7 students, and each of those students gets 20 mins to explain their project to the moderator, and take questions and answers if there were any. We then get 10 mins to mark the student on Process, Solution, and an Overall mark from F to A+. We can also add comments about specific things to the marking sheet, which I found was a good way to collect all my thoughts before giving the actual marks. I think most of the students were expecting the moderation process to be really stressful and more like 'giving a presentation' than just talking to some guy about what they'd done. I certainly hope it was easier than they were expecting.
I've been to the last 2 or 3 degree shows to scout for talent in the past, but generally there hasn't been much of a focus on Web design. This year was a lot more impressive for me personally, with a much greater focus on technology solutions, and a fairly large number of web designs that would work in real world situations.
There should definately be some kind of CSS/HTML part of the course, whether it be optional or not, that covers real world standards and best practices, as most of the markup I saw was self taught, and didn't show a great understanding, but thats a fault in the curriculum, so I didn't mark anyone down for it.
The only dissapointing thing was when I had to give not-so-great marks based on a project, when I knew that a person was capable of much much better work, as I'd seen the portfolio's of most of them the week before. All I can say is that in my experience, people in the industry hire on portfolios, not marks.
I'm not going to mention any specific work in fear of being accused of favouritism or something, but there was a lot of great work this year. The course seems to be maturing a lot.
Also, if anyone needs or wants any advice on the real world of the web design industry, flick me an email and say hi.