Prior Verification - HN and SQA Advanced
SQA offers prior verification for centres that decide to develop their own instruments of assessment, and this page provides you with guidance and information to support whatever process you wish to undertake.
The pre-verification services that we offer are:
- combined assessment support
- prior verification
We are encouraging centres, particularly course teams, to consider and plan innovative approaches to assessment, and to seek opportunities to combine assessment where there is commonality or duplication across units of study.
It is important to align any combined assessment or internally developed instruments of assessment to the subject information or regulatory requirements as well as being in line with the qualification requirements. These services ensures your assessments are fit for purpose and take about six weeks to process but could take longer if an issue is identified.
Details of where to find subject specific information depending on the product type you are undertaking:
Centres should make assessment tools as relevant as possible to suit local needs and to enable candidates to demonstrate their skills/knowledge. We strongly recommend that you request prior verification before using a centre devised assessment with candidates and their associated marking schemes.
To support you to develop your own instruments of assessment our SQA Secure site hosts an online library of successful prior verification, and combined assessment applications.
Requests for prior verification should be submitted through your SQA Co-ordinator, and please note that the form will ask for your permission to share your materials once verified, including newly accepted combined assessments, and these will be added to this library when approved by us.
Prior verification forms and guidance (in documents library).
Should you have questions regarding the changes to the pre-verification service, contact us by completing the form or call us on 0345 213 5928.