Assessment criteria
Updated grading criteria grids in line with the Office for Students 2022 quality compliance requirements for degree outcomes.
In spring 2022 the Office for Students (OfS) required all higher education providers to revise their assessment criteria; the new OfS requirements see a change in the language around a low pass (40-49%) with a focus on what has been achieved and a compulsory emphasis on standards around spelling, punctuation, grammar and numeracy. Under the new requirements any assignments where these elements can be assessed, they must be, at all levels. It is up to local marking teams to include the clarity of expression criterion.
Please note that the Level 7 criteria have been updated in June 2023 and should be used as the basis for assessment criteria for level 7 courses going forward in 2023/24. The new criteria were approved through the Education and Student Experience Committee and have been developed by LTE in collaboration with faculty representatives, our Students’ Union and Quality and Standards Office.
While updating our grading criteria in line with OfS requirements, we have also taken this opportunity to phrase the criteria more compassionately to encourage students to engage with feedback. To support academic staff, Learning & Teaching Enhancement has designed exemplar grading criteria menus for a range of assessments; these menus can be found in the Guidance document (below).
The module lead may wish to make some minor amendments to add in discipline specific language, but qualitative language about the performance levels (e.g., excellent, sound, broad, detailed) should not be altered as these levels have been aligned across the university.
Excel spreadsheets specially formatted to work with Turnitin are provided for colleagues to download, adapt (as per guidance document) and upload. Staff may prefer to adapt the Word documents for their module handbooks.
To find out more about the changes, why they matter and what academics need to do if you are not already familiar with the process and changes from the autumn workshops, please sign-up on StaffSpace for the 30-minute online workshop “Help! Updating your grading criteria for 2023”. The grading criteria as updated in summer 2022 need to be applied on modules starting in semesters/trimesters 2 and 3 as well as 1, but please note that there were no further changes to the grading criteria since the summer 2022 edits.
For step-by-step guidance and a screencast video on how to update and upload rubrics to Turnitin, see The Knowledge Base toolkit.