The Scottish Standard

Scottish flag masthead.

Welcome to our new Scottish Standard web pages which are intended to help you understand how we maintain qualification and assessment standards by describing briefly what we do and directing you to online information. By qualification standards, we mean the levels of knowledge and skills that learners need to demonstrate to gain the qualification.

The 'Scottish Standard' is good news for everyone who cares about Scotland's qualifications. We are bringing all our standards' work under this new label because we want you to understand fully how we maintain standards and to have confidence in our qualifications. The Scottish Standard will help us carry out our role as Scotland's National Qualifications body which means we are responsible for:

  • determining the requirements for SQA awarding body's qualification and assessment standards
  • publishing reports on our performance
  • investigating complaints and claims of malpractice in relation to our qualifications

You can find out more information about our awarding body role at http://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/5656.html and about the Scottish Standard in the following publications:


Maintaining Qualification and Assessment Standards

SQA has a responsibility to individual learners and to the wider public to ensure that qualification standards are accurate and fair and are maintained from year to year and across qualifications. For this reason we are setting out the five stages involved to set and maintain qualification and assessment standards as clearly as we can. We want to help you understand fully how we carry out this very important work on your behalf.

The stages are:

Stage One: Setting and revising standards of qualifications and assessments at the initial design and revision stages by using appropriate national benchmarks (including the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF)), international benchmarks, industry standards and equivalent existing qualifications.

Stage Two: Sharing standards of our qualifications and assessments with end-users such as centres, employers and learners. This includes providing qualification and assessment specifications (outlines of what is required), assessment exemplars and examples of learner work.

Stage Three: Applying standards of qualifications and assessments on an ongoing basis.
For internally-assessed qualifications this is done by markers and internal verifiers (teachers, lecturers and trainers) in centres and subject to external verification by SQA-trained practitioners who have a firm understanding of the SQA standard. Externally-assessed qualifications are marked by SQA, and a set of quality assurance procedures are applied to ensure that standards are consistently accurate between markers and over time.

Stage Four: Reporting on standards to learners, centres and the public
This includes reporting on how SQA qualifications, assessments and learners are 'performing'. For example, we report annually, by subject, by publishing Principal Assessor and Senior Verifier reports. These identify areas where learners are doing well and where there is room for improvement

Stage Five: Continuously reviewing and improving how we maintain standards
We monitor standards annually through, for example, analysing Principal Assessor and Senior Verifier reports and carrying out an annual monitoring standards programme. We also research current practice to identify improvements we can make.