UAL Marking Criteria
Assessment is a very important part of your course. The assessment on your course is designed to enable you to practise and demonstrate the learning outcomes. The marks you receive in the final stage constitute your degree results. However, before that, and arguably even more importantly, feedback on your work supports your learning by helping you understand what is expected of your work at this level, analysing what you have achieved so far, and indicating how you can improve your work in future.
Marking Criteria
There are eight standard UAL marking criteria:
- Research
- Technical competence
- Subject knowledge
- Communication and presentation
- Experimentation
- Personal and professional development
- Analysis
- Collaborative and/or independent professional working
These will be applied to your work to help you understand what you have accomplished, how any grade given was arrived at, and how you can improve your work in future. We hope that using the criteria and a standard feedback sheet will help you understand:
- what tutors are looking for
- the strengths of your work
- what aspects of your work you can develop in future
- why you received the mark you did, relative to others in your group
Not all the criteria will be relevant to every course unit or assignment. Any criteria which do not apply will be marked as such.
The relationship between the course learning outcomes and the UAL marking criteria
Your course is designed to enable you to demonstrate the learning outcomes by completing the assessments. Your work will be assessed through the UAL marking criteria, which have been developed to help tutors give you clear and helpful feedback on your work. Your course handbook shows the relationship between the course and unit learning outcomes and the marking criteria.
Assessment Briefings
Your course handbook will include the marking criteria matrix according to which your work will be assessed. The standard UAL marking criteria feedback form may have been customised to ensure the criteria’s relevance and suitability to your course unit or assignment. Your assessment brief will include the customised feedback form.
Criteria are not weighted (i.e. a specific proportion of your mark is not attributed to each criterion); markers will consider your work as a whole. However, some criteria may be given more emphasis at some times than others, to support your learning or because of the nature of the assignment. Any particular emphasis in terms of the criteria will be made clear in the assignment brief.
Assessment Grading & the University Marking Scale
Your work will be given a Letter Grade on the University Marking Scale. The Letter Grades represent a high, middle and low point within each degree classification. The markers will use the marking criteria to inform their decision of what grade to give you. Each Letter Grade has a point value which is used by the University to calculate your end of year result. The Honours Degree, Foundation Degree and Postgraduate Degree Marking Scales can be found on the Marking Scale Pages.
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Glossary
Find definitions of terms like ‘learning outcomes’ here.
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FAQs
Answers to some frequently asked questions can be found here.
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Report
Read an Evaluation of marking criteria at UAL by Duna Sabri, Visiting Research Fellow here.
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Download
Go to the Download the forms page to find examples of the forms.
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Watch
A video interview with students who used the criteria as part of the pilot in 2009.
