Guide to the Code of Assessment 2025-26 – Introduction

Location of the Code

The Code of Assessment is published as Regulation 16 of the ‘University Fees and General Information’ chapter of the University Regulations. It contains most but not all of the regulations relating to assessment.

If in any case an explanation or illustration in this guide appears to contradict the terms of the Code itself, the Code takes precedence.

Key Changes for 2025-26

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1.  Incomplete Assessment resulting from Extenuating Circumstances (formerly Good Cause) – Chapter 5

The former ‘Good Cause’ process in Regulation 16 (the Code of Assessment, §16.45 - §16.53) has undergone substantive procedural amendments which have been designed to better support students, streamline processes, and increase accountability to Senate while maintaining academic standards. Implementation of the revised processes is taking place during the course of session 2025-26. Separate communications are being issued containing more detail on the changes.

Please note the immediate change in terminology from 'Good Cause' to 'Extenuating Circumstances' to reflect sector-standard terminology and improve clarity for staff and students.

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2.  Honours: Progress and Award Decisions where Extenuating Circumstances have been accepted – Chapter 5

Traditionally, students have been required to complete an Honours year in one academic session. The relevant regulations have now been reviewed by Academic Standards Committee, resulting in the introduction of greater flexibility in the requirements where, due to Extenuating Circumstances, assessment is incomplete by the end of the session. Existing progress regulations were outdated as they had been written in the context of assessments being heavily concentrated at the end of an academic session. These have been revised (see §16.52(e) for the full regulation):

Where assessment has been impacted by Extenuating Circumstances, at the end of Junior Honours or at the end of years 3 or 4 of an integrated Masters programme:

  • Students who have completed less than 75% of that year’s assessment will be required to repeat the year.
  • Students who have completed 75% of the year’s assessment but have incomplete assessment on a course or courses carrying more than 20 credits will be required to remedy the incomplete assessment before progressing.
  • Students who have completed more than 75% of the year’s assessment, with incomplete assessment on courses carrying 20 credits or less, may progress but will be expected to remedy the incomplete assessment during the next year alongside their other work.

All Schools have now been asked to ensure that Summer assessment opportunities are made available to Honours students who have incomplete assessment through Extenuating Circumstances. This should minimise the number of students unable to meet the revised progress requirements. It is noted in the regulations that, where appropriate, programme teams may specify a higher progress threshold than 75% completion of assessment. Also, College Deans have discretion to approve progress where a stated threshold is not met.

At the end of the final year of an honours programme (§16.52(f)):

  • An award will be made where students have completed 75% of the overall programme assessment, i.e. 25% or less of the assessment is incomplete due to Extenuating Circumstances – this is unchanged from previous regulations.
  • Where less than 75% of the assessment is complete, students will be required to complete - in the following academic session - all assessment that was missed through Extenuating Circumstances.
  • Where the independent work (dissertation/project) has, due to Extenuating Circumstances, not been submitted, this must be submitted by the end of semester 1 of the following session.
  • Where less than 75% of the assessment has been completed and there is no prospect of the student returning to study, the Board of Examiners may consider recommending the award of an unclassified honours degree – this is unchanged from previous regulations.

Where students are required to remedy incomplete assessment:

  • Assessment may be completed with attendance or on an assessment-only basis.
  • A repeat of a full year or of a single semester may be offered, taking account of how a student’s overall learning and/or assessment has been impacted.
  • Assessment must be in the same format as that offered at the first opportunity with the following exception: where it is impossible for the student in an assessment-only year to take the assessment in the same format, an alternative format may be offered where the Head of School confirms that this allows demonstration of the same ILOs and neither advantages nor disadvantages the student.

Advising Teams will have an important role in assessing the appropriate arrangements for students.

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3.  Limiting the Percentage of Components and Sub-components of Assessment that are not Reassessable to 25% by Weight of a Course’s Summative Assessment – Chapter 3

For all assessments other than those contributing to an Honours degree classification, the normal expectation is that a reassessment opportunity should always be available.

The Code of Assessment allows that, in exceptional circumstances (and where this has been approved by the Head of School), some of the assessment for a course may be deemed not to be re-assessable – i.e. no reassessment opportunity will be available. As advised in last session’s Key Changes document, with effect from session 2025-26, this exception can apply to no more than 25% by weight of a course’s summative assessment and §16.9 has now been adjusted accordingly.

This change addresses potentially unfair assessment practice, particularly where students miss an assessment opportunity due to illness resulting in a successful application for Extenuating Circumstances.

It is recognised that there might be exceptional circumstances where it will be impossible to limit such cases to 25% of a course’s assessment, in which case permission for deviating from the regulation must be sought from the Clerk of Senate (please contact: apg-academic-regulations@glasgow.ac.uk).

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4.  Assessment (other than examinations): Penalties for late submission – Chapter 2

It has been clarified in §16.26 (b) that for work submitted more than five working days after the deadline:

i)   where feedback on the work has not yet been provided to the student class, Grade H should be awarded;

ii)  where feedback has already been provided to the student class, the work will be counted as a non-submission.

This is the default position but course teams may vary this where appropriate.

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5.  Online Exam Submissions and Late Penalties – Chapter 2

A number of different formats of online exams are in use and submission arrangements also vary. The regulations now clarify two points for exams where different parts of the exam are submitted separately, §16.28(d):

  • Where different parts of an exam are submitted separately, and any are late, a penalty should only be applied to the part(s) submitted late and not to the full exam.
  • If any part of such an exam is submitted by the end of the scheduled exam time (or by the end of any available late submission window) the exam as a whole will be treated as having been submitted.

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6.  Management of the Assessment Scheme and Boards of Examiners meetings – Chapter 6

There has been some updating of the roles and responsibilities of Heads of Schools and Assessment Officers, with a greater emphasis on the need for Schools to provide, and for examiners to participate in, training and updates on policy and practice. (§16.57 - §16.62).

Section 16.66 has been expanded to set out more clearly the various actions of the Board of Examiners. This is supported by new Instructions for Assessment Officers and Chairs of Boards of Examiners.

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7.  Posthumous Awards – Chapter 5

The former practice at the University has been that any posthumous award would only recognise the study and assessment that the student had completed. Many other institutions award posthumously in cases where the student had not completed the programme of study, if there was strong evidence that they would otherwise have satisfied the requirements for the award. The newly agreed posthumous award regulations set out in §16.81 will apply from session 2025-26 and bring the University into alignment with the sector.

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8.  Review of Grades

With effect from session 2025-26, several new or amended course grades come into usage:

The ‘MV’ grade has been re-named as ‘EC’ to tie it more closely with the nomenclature of ’Extenuating Circumstances’ (what was previously referred to as Good Cause).

The ‘7’ code (used to indicate a deferred result) has been re-named as ‘DFR’.

A new grade ‘ECW’ will be available for any course where the requirements for the award of credit have not yet been satisfied (assessment not submitted, without Extenuating Circumstances) and, in addition, some assessment is missing owing to Extenuating Circumstances. Use of the ECW code signals to the Board of Examiners at a high level that there is a complex set of underlying missing assessment which needs to be considered carefully. (See examples in Chapter 4.)

A new set of course grades will be available on programmes whose students must achieve particular grades on assessment components within courses. (This affects only a small number of programmes and is generally associated with requirements set by external accrediting bodies). Where the overall course grade hides the fact that any component requirements have not been met, an ‘X’ will be prefixed to the course grade.

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Other Assessment Regulations

The ‘University Fees and General Information’ chapter of the University Regulations contains further Regulations relevant to assessment which are not part of the Code and are therefore not included in this Guide. These Regulations are:

  • Instructions to candidates on their conduct in written examinations (Regulation 17)
  • Use of a computer in an examination (Regulation 18)
  • Use of dictionaries by students in examinations (Regulation 19)
  • Use of electronic calculators by students in examinations (Regulation 20)
  • Invigilation (Regulation 21)
  • Rules of invigilation (Regulation 22)
  • Appointment of external examiners for taught courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level (Regulation 23)
  • Examination and other assessment arrangements for disabled students (Regulation 24)
  • Code of practice for exceptional international examination arrangements (Regulation 25)

The Essence of the Code

Assessment is an integral part of the process by which the University makes awards to students who have completed their programmes. The regulations which comprise the Code of Assessment are intended to deliver transparently fair and consistent outcomes in all student assessment. It is the pursuit of transparency which has imposed most demands on the design of the Code and on examiners.

If a student was to receive a mark of 67% for a very good essay, we may take for granted that this mark was fair and reflective of consistent standards. We therefore assume that students who had performed as well in previous years might also have got 67%, and, within this student’s own cohort, those students whose essays were less good were awarded less than 67% and those who had written better essays achieved marks higher than 67%. But this model of fairness and academic rigour has two weaknesses:

  • Its range of consistency is very limited – students in other subjects who had demonstrated as thorough a grasp of their course content might have scored 87% or even more.
  • It is meaningless beyond the function of ranking students – the essay was a very good one and yet it scored only two thirds of the way up the scale of 0 to 100.

The object of the Code of Assessment is to make assessment outcomes as consistent as possible across all taught disciplines within this University, and to provide a clear statement of the learning that each student has demonstrated.

Chapter 1 of this Guide discusses intended learning outcomes (ILOs). ILOs tell students what they are expected to learn, and all universities are required to publish these. One of the things the Code of Assessment does is make an explicit connection between ILOs and the assessment of each student’s performance. Thus employers (and anyone else) may determine what the grades reported in a student’s transcript actually mean.

Chapter 2 explains how this connection is made by a set of grade descriptors, in which each grade is described in terms of a student’s achievement of ILOs. What the examiner has to do is determine which grade descriptor best matches the student’s performance. The University’s main assessment schedule (Schedule A) uses eight grades, A to H, and the bands into which these grades are divided allow the marker 23 discrete scores from A1 to H. The chance awkwardness of this number confirms that a student’s performance is being assessed against grade descriptors, not as a ratio of right answers to questions asked.

University awards are not made on the basis of a single assessment. The Code must, therefore, provide a way of aggregating grades from all summative components. The simplest and most readily transparent method of combining grades is to convert them into numbers, and Chapter 2 explains how this should be done and how the final score should be translated to a course result or a classified degree.

Other Aspects of the Code

As noted, it is an objective of the Code to deliver fair and consistent outcomes in all student assessment. Consistency across the University requires regulation; fairness calls for sensitivity, on the one hand, to the individual student – recognising when their circumstances justify special provision – and, on the other, to the integrity of the University’s awards. These issues are never far from the surface in the rules governing reassessment (Chapter 3) and incomplete assessment resulting from Extenuating Circumstances (Chapter 5). Course credits represent a transferable currency – this University will recognise credits gained by students in other institutions just as other institutions will recognise the value of credits awarded here – and students must accumulate course credits in order to qualify for a certificate, diploma or degree. Chapter 4 is concerned with setting minimum standards for the award of credits. Chapter 6 is about making the whole thing work, and sets out the responsibilities of Heads of Schools, assessment officers and examiners, both internal and external.

Any queries regarding the Code of Assessment (published in the University Regulations) or the Guide to the Code should be directed to apg-academic-regulations@glasgow.ac.uk.