Procedures for Verification

Our quality assurance processes have been developed to ensure that national standards are applied to internally assessed Units or Course components.

To maintain the credibility of SQA qualifications, we rely on effective collaboration with centres to ensure national standards are maintained across all qualifications at all levels.

Verification is the procedure we use to make sure that centres' assessment decisions are valid and reliable and are in line with national standards.

Why do we need Verification?

Verification is one of a range of Quality Assurance measures used by SQA to confirm that:

• centres' assessment decisions are; valid, reliable and workable
• national standards are being uniformly applied
• assessments are accurately and consistently applied across all candidates and levels

This ensures qualifications and certification is credible with all candidates being assessed to a common standard.

Internal verification

Centres are responsible for the internal verification of their assessments. This means that centres should have an internal verification system - a system of having quality checks in place - which can be operated throughout the centre. Each member of staff who is responsible for the assessment of candidates and/or internal verification of candidate material should:

• be made aware of your centre's quality assurance procedures
• comply with these procedures

External verification

To ensure national consistency in assessment decisions, we appoint experienced teachers/lecturers who have good, recent experience in the delivery and assessment of their subject to carry out external verification in centres. We will notify the SQA Co-ordinator if your centre has been selected for verification.

We want to encourage centres and staff to see verification in a positive light, as a valuable Quality Improvement tool.