We went along to the annual External Verifier (EV) update meeting on Saturday. This year’s event was chaired by the new Senior External Verifier for Computing. The role of the Senior EV has changed. It’s now more of a leadership role than a bureaucratic one. The purpose of the annual update is to ensure that EVs are familiar with procedures, and that they all apply the same standards during their visits to centres. A wide range of issues were discussed at…
I mentioned a few months ago that Gillian Leitch (West College) was about to become Senior External Verifier (SEV) for Computing, which covers three verification groups: (1) Computer Science; (2) Digital Literacy; and (3) Information Technology. Gillian formally takes over from David Drennan on 1 August. Gillian has been an External Verifier for a long time so this is a natural progression for her. She is widely respected in the Computing community. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank…
We had an interesting discussion this morning about credit transfer, having received a request from a centre. Credit transfer means awarding a pass in one Unit based on a pass in another Unit. This can be desirable when a learner has a mix of Units (taken as part of different qualifications) that they want to “transfer” to one award. It’s typically done when students want to transfer Unit passes in an old qualification to a new one. The final decision about…
The central verification for the HNC Computing Graded Unit (Examination) takes place today. The Senior External Verifier (David Drennan) and his team are in the building looking over hundreds of exam papers and scripts to ensure that they meet the national standard. I visited the team at lunchtime to see how things are going. They’re going well. David told me that the standards were good and that, so far, there were no serious issues. We had an interesting discussion about permitting…
