Music: Quality Assurance - external verification

External verification is part of SQA’s quality assurance process designed to ensure that a centre’s assessment approach and assessment judgements are valid, reliable and meet national standards.

All SQA internal assessments must be internally verified by centres.

Unit assessment

The new qualifications offer opportunities for personalisation and choice. Teachers and lecturers have more flexibility to determine the most appropriate methods of assessment for individual learners, and to use their professional judgement in determining whether or not a candidate’s evidence meets the Outcomes and Assessment Standards of the Unit.

Any evidence for assessment must be of a type that allows valid judgements to be made against Outcomes and Assessment Standards. Candidate evidence for Unit assessment in this subject is therefore likely to include some of the following:

  • text, graphical or pictorial evidence, including printable electronic
  • electronic product that is not printable
  • oral presentation or other oral response
  • performance

SQA has anticipated that all Units for this subject are likely to have evidence that is suitable for submission to SQA for a verification event. Guidance on evidence to be submitted for a verification event, including formats for submitting candidate evidence, can be found in the Evidence for verification events document.

If recordings of performances are made for the purposes of verification, centres must ensure that the quality is sufficiently high to allow an External Verifier to verify the centre’s assessment judgements.

It is anticipated that this subject may provide particularly good opportunities to gather naturally-occurring evidence — evidence that is generated during teaching and learning activities and not in response to an assessment task. For verification purposes, centres should ensure that they are able to provide sufficient details of any direction or instructions used in this context to allow the External Verifier to assess the validity of the centre’s assessment judgements of that evidence.

Further information on verification can be found at our Overview of Quality Assurance.