Listing external examiner service on a CV?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, ECR writes:

I am an ECR (~5 years post-PhD) and I am starting to get my first invitations to be an external examiner for PhD and MA theses. Is this something one should list on one's CV? (It seems prima facie like an indicator of scholarly esteem.) If so, how? (what section should it go in, what information should one provide, etc.)

Good questions. This does seem like something to list on a CV, and one reader submitted the following reply:

List it under teaching. I have a section on my c.v. labelled teaching. There is a subsection labeled (i) Courses taught, another labeled (ii) Supervision, and another labeled (iii) Educational training and development. Under supervision I list post-docs supervised, PhD committees served on, Masters theses supervised, and various Masters projects supervised. I have another section labelled Refereeing and Evaluations. The subheadings include: journals, publishers, conferences and projects, funding agencies, editorships and editorial boards, and "PhD theses, tenure and promotion reviews, and hiring" (I have been an external evaluator for jobs at other universities - common in Europe).

I would have thought it should be listed under "service", or at least, this is probably where someone would (and should) list it at my university. At my university, teaching (as defined in the faculty handbook for annual merit raises, tenure, and promotion) only applies to courses officially taught at the university--all else is considered research or service. So, I guess what I would advice ECR to do is to see which category it fits in best where they are and put it there. But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?

Comments

[Daniel Weltman]

1) So long as you list it, it doesn't really matter what category you list it in. Anyone who would get upset about you listing it in one category or another will just find something else to get upset about instead if you happen to list it under their preferred category rather than their dispreferred category. So there's no reason to worry about this, except insofar as you're wondering whether to list it at all (and I say yes, list it, because why not?).

2) You can solve the problem by having a separate "research supervision" heading on your CV which is not a subheading. Depending on what kind of external examining you do, you might need a slightly more capacious heading, so adjust as needed.