Our assessment quality
standards
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Our assessment quality standards
Our assessment quality standards
Producing assessments – how we ensure quality
All the assessment materials we produce pass through many quality assurance stages. At each stage,
the questions and mark schemes are reviewed to check that they are consistent with the syllabus and
with what the assessment has set out to measure. This is a key requirement for assessment validity.
Early in the process, panels of subject and assessment experts, led by the principal examiner,
scrutinise the features and details of every question and its mark scheme and of the assessment as a
whole. Improvements are made to the content, wording and layout of the assessment on the basis of
these panel evaluations. This includes making sure that the question paper is accessible to a broad
spectrum of learners.
The assessment materials then pass through several further cycles of review, revision and
improvement. Towards the end of the process, the quality and validity of each assessment is
independently reviewed by a subject expert who has had no previous sight of it. In the final stages,
the assessment materials are proofread by a professional proofreader and checked that they are fit-
for-purpose and error-free by the principal examiner.
After the assessments have been taken, we evaluate the statistical data, which shows us how well
questions have performed, and listen to feedback from schools. This information is fed into future
cycles of assessment production to help us improve the quality and validity of our assessments.
Marking assessments – how we ensure quality
All our examiners are subject experts who are fully trained to mark our assessments. Before
proceeding to mark live candidate responses, they must pass a standardisation exercise to prove that
they are able to apply the mark scheme in the same way as the principal examiner. This is a rigorous
process which happens for every examiner, for every component, every series.
Examiners who progress to marking live candidate responses are regularly monitored to check that
they are continuing to apply the mark scheme consistently and correctly. A monitoring check we
often use is seeding. Examiners re-mark 'seed' scripts which have been previously marked by the
principal examiner. The identity of the seed scripts is not known in advance to the examiner, so this is
a powerful blind check of marking quality. The marks the examiner has given to the seed script are
compared to the marks given by the principal examiner. Where there is evidence that the examiner is
not applying the mark scheme in the same way as the principal examiner, we take corrective action.
Find out more about how we
mark scripts
.
After qualifications have been graded and before the release of results, we use our grade review
process as a further check of marking quality. At grade review, senior examiners re-mark candidates’
scripts where the candidate’s mark is close to a grade threshold at syllabus level and the candidate is
at risk of receiving an inappropriate syllabus grade for at least one other reason.