Course and assessment setup

Departments should, in advance of the academic year in which exams are due to take place:

• Establish standing orders – these set the terms for the composition of the nominating committee and the number of examiners that will serve on the exam board.
• Check and circulate exam conventions – these set out how examined work will be marked and how the marks are used to arrive at a final classification. They should be checked at the first meeting of examiners. 
• Complete the assessment review – a review of the assessments and assessment structures must be completed via eVision each summer.
• Appoint examiners – This activity is administered via EAP portal. Information and guidance is available from the Examiner Appointments and Payments webpages. 
• Confirm Exam Board meeting dates – must be submitted as early as possible to eVision each academic year and by no later than 1 November. For full guidance on how to submit the dates, please refer to the Exam Board Dates Quick Reference Guide available from the Student Systems webpage.

Colleges should:

• Ensure candidates are entered for exams at the appropriate times and any necessary dispensations are applied for (eg students who wish to be examined under old syllabus)
• Consider whether they have enough invigilators and book them onto training sessions.

Exam conventions are the University’s formal record of the specific assessment standards for the course or courses to which they apply

They are a student-facing document and should be written in a clear and comprehensible manner. The same version of the exam conventions should be used by examiners, with more detailed local operational guidance appended if necessary.

At their first meeting, examiners should satisfy themselves that their exam conventions are comprehensive and unambiguous. They may suggest amendments and formalise interpretations: any such modifications must be approved by the supervisory body.

Exam conventions must be circulated to all students and also published, either as part of the course handbook or separately, in a place easily accessible to students at least one full term before the exam takes place. Where assessment takes place in the first term of the course, they should be published at the beginning of that term. Ideally, exam conventions should be publicly available so that prospective students may have access to them. If this is not possible, they should be accessible via Single Sign-On (SSO) to anyone in the University so that the Proctors and colleges have access to them.

An examination conventions template is available in the Examinations and assessments framework (EAF).

Responsibilities of the supervisory body and examiners in relation to exam conventions are outlined in the Examinations and assessments framework (EAF).