The Office for Students (OfS) has worked with a group of sector representatives to establish new guidance for universities and colleges on the retention of students’ assessed work in relation to OfS conditions B4 and B5.
The OfS’s conditions of registration require universities and colleges to ensure that the way they assess students is effective and that the qualifications awarded to students are credible. The guidance that accompanies the conditions sets out how universities and colleges should approach retaining appropriate records of students’ assessed work. The OfS welcomed feedback from the sector that asked for further information about how to interpret the OfS’s existing guidance on these conditions.
In acknowledgement of this feedback, the OfS set up a working group with sector representatives to draw on the group’s advice to develop supplementary guidance for providers. This group included representatives from Universities UK, the Association of Heads of University Administration, Jisc, and the Academic Registrars’ Council.
The supplementary guidance emphasises the latitude institutions have to make their own judgements about the retention of work and provides further guidance about the types of record that are sufficient for the OfS’s regulatory purposes. It also provides information about the factors institutions should consider when determining and sampling appropriate records of assessments for retention in their particular context.
