External Examining and Assessment at NTU

Assessment at NTU is founded upon five key values: It is

• fair
• transparent
• easy to understand
• non-arbitrary
• non-inflationary.

This means that our regulations, and assessment practice, are designed to ensure that an individual student’s academic outcome is the result of appropriate assessment of their performance across the course.

The University uses a range of approaches to ensure the appropriateness of assessment decisions. This includes ensuring that assessment tasks are designed to make judgements about whether students have met specific learning outcomes; aligning grading criteria for different stages of a students’ journey to University and sector-based expectations; moderating assessment tasks and assessment grades, including involving an academic colleague from outside the University in this process; and making sure that the aggregation of grades at the end of an academic year, or at the end of a student’s degree, fairly and appropriately reflects overall performance.

The University uses a grade-based marking framework where students are assigned grades, not percentages, to their work. Students get practice in understanding this framework, and the expectations of learning in higher education, via formative assessment tasks as they progress through their course. The University has expectations relating to this formative assessment and the feedback that students receive which supports them in their learning, and in their preparation for later assessments.