Regulating post-16 VTQs at L2 and L3

Setting and maintaining standards

Setting and maintaining grading standards is a critical responsibility for an awarding organisation to ensure that grades are trustworthy and reliable over time so that students' achievement is properly represented. The approach to setting standards is impacted by the qualification and assessment design, which in turn should be influenced by the need to maintain standards.

Proposal

These qualifications will include common design characteristics, which means that given the intention for greater comparability between awarding organisations, it is appropriate for Ofqual to specify approaches to the setting and maintenance of standards. Where we specify such approaches, we often do this by putting in place requirements about the sources of evidence awarding organisations should use to inform standard setting and ongoing maintenance of standards. This may include qualitative evidence, such as work produced by students or views of employers on the expected standard of performance, and quantitative evidence, such as data showing how well as assessment has functioned, or a breakdown of the proportion of students achieving each grade.

For numerical mark-based assessments, this includes specifying which grade boundaries are key grade boundaries that must be determined by senior examiners, and which are arithmetic, so calculated at intervals between the key grade boundaries.

For numerical mark-based assessments, we propose that the Pass/Ungraded grade boundary is designated as a ‘key’ grade boundary and that the Distinction/Merit grade boundary would also be a key grade. This means the Merit grade would be set arithmetically, by dividing the mark gap between Pass and Distinction.

We propose that in setting and maintaining standards for Foundation Certificates and Occupational Certificates, awarding organisations should have regard to a range of appropriate evidence, which should include:

• the level of Demand of the assessments for that qualification
• the level of attainment demonstrated in those assessments by a representative sample of Learners
• the level of attainment demonstrated by Learners taking that qualification in prior assessments or qualifications
• the level of attainment demonstrated by Learners who have previously been awarded the qualification.

Where directly graded assessments are used, expected levels of attainment will be determined through the grading criteria, not through any separate awarding process. We propose that awarding organisations should explain key features of the approach taken in their assessment strategies. These include, for example, how it is ensured that the grading criteria are appropriate for the content to be assessed, the level of the qualification and the grading scale, as well as how their consistent interpretation by assessors is supported. Awarding organisations will be required to explain how they are used in aggregating students’ attainment, both for individual assessments and for the qualification as a whole.

We propose that in setting and maintaining standards, awarding organisations should use approaches that ensure that overall assessment is compensatory, to allow for performance in one area to be compensated for by performance in another. We intend to work with awarding organisations to develop more consistent approaches to the overall aggregation of results, including in relation to compensatory assessment approaches.  

To support approaches to setting initial standards, we propose that awarding organisations should not be permitted to award Occupational Certificates in the first year they are made available. This will ensure the first awards, which will inform the initial standard awarding organisations will subsequently need to maintain, will be based on a representative sample of student work from across the 2-year course. A similar requirement is not required for Foundation Certificates as these are designed to be 1-year courses.

Our proposed Conditions FC8 and OC8 and associated requirements are set out in Annexes B and C.