Credit, GPAs and reassessment
Part of Key changes to the University Regulations for 2026-27.
These are the changes to how course and degree outcomes are calculated: what you need at course design time, at Boards of Examiners, and when a student asks what their grades mean.
Award of credit and compensatory credit
Award of credit rules are the rules that determine whether a course counts towards a student’s degree. They answer the question: should this course contribute to the student’s qualification or not? Across the HE sector, if a student demonstrates engagement with either the course or with the year overall, then the courses are awarded credit towards the degree. This is separate from deciding whether the student has met the requirements for award or progression: award of credit asks whether the session counts towards the student’s degree, or whether the student should instead be considered for a repeat year or an exit award.
In line with sector standards, credit is now awarded either course-by-course when a student achieves a course grade of D or above, or for all the courses in a session where a student achieves course grades of D or above for two-thirds or more of that session’s credits.
The 75% submission rule has gone, and with it the Honours-wide submission calculation and the Credit Withheld, Credit Refused, and ECW codes.
Where a student is awarded credit for a session based on two-thirds or more of a session being graded at D or above, the term “compensatory credit” is used to refer to the award of credit for a course with a grade below D. Compensatory credit does not inflate grades. If a student receives compensatory credit for a course in which they received an F1, that F1 grade still enters the GPA calculation and has consequences. The change is only about whether the course contributes to the session or not, not about upgrading the grade itself. The compensatory credit calculation happens centrally, so you do not need to operate it.
Where programmes previously had special requirements for the award of credit (that is, where the 75% rule was not appropriate, due to regulatory or statutory body requirements), then these programmes may specify the programme overall, or particular courses within it, are not eligible for compensatory credit.
Unless your programme already had special award of credit rules and Project Compass has already spoken to you about them, you do not need to make any changes in connection with compensatory credit. No programme should be adding local award of credit provisions in response to these changes. For all programmes, compensatory credit will not apply for substantial independent work (such as Masters projects or dissertations), or where a conduct penalty forbids it. An excluded course, such as a failed dissertation, goes to reassessment.
Finally, compensatory credit can also be used in the situation where students in the final year of their programme have a limited amount of assessment missing due to Extenuating Circumstances but it is not desirable to delay the student’s graduation to complete all assessment. In this instance courses which have EC outcomes and the outcomes are not going to be assessed can be recorded as ECC (Extenuating Circumstances Complete) and no part of the assessment for that course will contribute to the student’s classification. This provision can only apply up to the maximum volume of compensatory credit permitted for the session. Note that courses at ECC share the compensatory credit allowance with any failed courses.
You can find details in the Guide to the Assessment Regulations.
All GPAs come in two forms
GPA is now calculated for each academic session, and session GPAs are then aggregated to create overall GPAs.
For sessions and overall results, ll students have both First-Attempt GPAs and Award GPAs. (Colleagues who work with PGT programmes will already be familiar with this concept.)
The Award GPA is used for progression and to determine if a student has met the minimum requirements for an award. It is calculated using the course’s Award Grade, which is derived from the best grade achieved at each assessment, taking into account any reassessment. If the Award Grade includes any reassessment grades, it is capped at the threshold grade for the programme (usually D3 for undergraduate programmes and C3 for postgraduate taught programmes).
The First-Attempt GPA is used solely for classification (1st, 2:1, etc) and endorsement (Merit/Distinction). It is calculated from the course’s First-Attempt Grades, which are derived from the grades for a student’s first attempt at all assessment, including any deferred first attempts undertaken due to ECs.
For many students who have not taken reassessment, the Award and First-Attempt GPAs will be identical. Students will be shown both GPAs for transparency.
Note that classification and endorsement criteria are now all in the Assessment Regulations (AR §16.35 to §16.39) where previously most were delegated to individual award regulations. As before, values are rounded half up at course outcome level (15.5 becomes 16, 15.4 becomes 15), and no decimals are retained at the course level or carried into later calculations. GPAs are expressed to one decimal place, rounded half up; no further rounding is then applied to that value, so 11.9 does not meet a requirement of 12.0.
Reassessment is only available where it makes a difference
Reassessment is a further attempt after an unsuccessful first attempt. The reassessment grade for an assessment, where it is higher than the original grade, will go into the Award Grade for a course and that course grade will be (rather than only the grade points, as in the past). Deferred assessment is a first attempt taken later because of approved Extenuating Circumstances.
Reassessment now exists at Honours, and one set of reassessment rules applies at every level. The loose use of the word “resit” can cause student confusion, especially where they actually have deferred assessment (given that we no longer talk about “sitting” an assessment), and so you should avoid the term.
Importantly, we now only offer reassessment where it makes a difference to a student. Remember that reassessment grades contribute to the Award GPA but never the First-Attempt GPA: reassessment can therefore only be used for a student to meet the minimum requirements for progression and award of a degree. For example, a student on an Honours programme (such as the BSc or MA) requires a minimum Award GPA of 9.0 to progress and to be awarded a degree. (The First-Attempt GPA separately determines the class of degree.) If that student fails one 20 credit course in Junior Honours, reassessment would only be appropriate for that student should the reassessment be necessary to meet that 9.0 Award GPA. Otherwise, the reassessment will make no practical difference to the student’s degree outcome: reassessment can never change the classification of a degree and the compensatory credit mechanism (see “Award of credit and compensatory credit” above) means that a limited number of courses will be awarded credit even if the course has a grade below D. A student may therefore fail a course but not be offered reassessment.
Overall, this will eliminate unnecessary or “cosmetic” reassessment, which at present puts a burden on staff and students for no reason. The mechanism is simple and operates after the Boards of Examiners which end a student’s session (usually in the spring): a student is offered reassessment in a failed course where they have both failed that course at the first attempt and their session GPA is below the progression or award threshold.
A student may also be offered reassessment where it is necessary for the student to gain a certain grade in a course to progress with their curriculum: for example, a student on MA History who failed History 1B in first year but otherwise meets the progression Award GPA of 9.0 may be offered reassessment in that course in order to meet the entry requirement for History 2A and 2B, as a D or above in History 1B is a requirement to enter the mandatory courses for the second year of their programme. This will be handled by Academic Review Panels, which replace the old Progress Committees. These panels will have Instructions issued to them by the Clerk of Senate with full information.
Note that some professional programmes have must-pass rules on all assessment set by regulatory or statutory bodies.
Degree Regulations: what to check for your programme
Progression and award thresholds have been reviewed and standardised. The ones most worth remembering:
- undergraduate progression and award: GPA 9.0 (higher for the Integrated Masters; MEng from Year 3 onwards: GPA 14.0; MSci from Year 3 onwards: GPA 12.0)
- entry to Honours: GPA 12.0 at first attempt in at least 40 credits of Level 2 courses in the Honours subject (reassessment grades do not count for entry unless the programme specification says otherwise)
- postgraduate taught progression to substantial independent work: GPA 12.0 with no course below F3 (Engineering: 9.0 with no course below E3)
Note that 9.0 is now also the floor of the third class Honours band (§16.36). Because the Assessment Regulations apply afresh each session, this floor applies to everyone classified from 2026-27 onwards, including students already partway through Honours. This change is because 9.0 corresponds to our lowest pass grade, and our consultations did not consider it appropriate to award a degree to a candidate with an average grade below a pass. It is mitigated by the introduction of reassessment at Honours, which gives students an additional route to the threshold.
“Unreassessable” content should be reduced
We have historically had a range of non-replicable components for which reassessment and deferred assessment cannot be offered. These can have pedagogical rationales but are increasingly in conflict with our obligations under disability and equality legislation. Some unreassessable components confer an advantage on students who complete them, such as continuous assessment designed to build skills incrementally. There can be no justification for denying that advantage to a student who has experienced an illness or bereavement, or who has a relapsing-remitting disability. Where a component confers no advantage but is essential for demonstrating a learning outcome, the position is no better. There is no justification for designing a course in which a learning outcome cannot be demonstrated by a disabled student, or by one who has experienced challenging circumstances through no fault of their own. Accordingly, courses should always be designed with assessment components which can be rerun at later points.
It is, however, the case that our existing practice does include some low-stakes small assessments which, while not being essential to demonstrate a learning outcome, do involve some element of experiential practice or low-stakes development of skills or engagement. Sometimes these small assessments are necessarily not reassessable, either because the burden of reassessing them is too high on staff and students, or because they are highly situated in place or time (such as one-off events or limited physical availability of resources) and so a reassessment would be of limited value. Under the new regulations, work like this totalling no more than 10% of a course’s assessment by weight may be excluded from the course calculation in the event of accepted EC.
In this situation, a School may award the new grade of ECC for up to 10% of a course, which will exclude that assessment from the course grade calculation. The course will keep the credit weighting it had before, and the course grade will be based entirely on the remaining 90% or more of assessment.
The regulations currently retain the rule where, with Head of School approval (AR §16.11), up to 25% of a course can be listed as unreassessable. We aim to reduce this figure in the next round of revisions to a maximum of 10%, and Schools are advised that courses with unreassessable work should be redesigned accordingly.
We recommend you now read: What you and your School need to do
Questions or feedback: policy@glasgow.ac.uk.