Assessment, Progression and Awarding Committees

What is an APAC?

One of the stages in approving your marks for the year, or your final degree, is that your exams or coursework results go to your Programme APAC:  the  Assessment, Progression and Awarding Committee. 

APACs make sure that the marking process is fair and appropriate, so you can be assured that you will get the result you deserve, whilst maintaining the long-term value of your Exeter degree.  

They ensure that the University’s awarding and progression rules have been correctly applied. They make decisions on who should progress to the next stage of their course, or for finalists who should graduate and what award they should receive. When students haven’t met the progression or award criteria the APAC decides what actions needs to be taken next.

They look at all the assessment results by module, and for each individual student. If the module results are very different to previous years they can adjust the marks of the whole group together – this is called ‘scaling’.

If an individual student is on the border say between achieving a 2:1 or a 1st class degree, they’ll look at all your results and might award the higher classification depending on how many marks were attained within the higher classification band. However, the results are anonymous, so the APACs won’t know whose marks are whose.

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(You can access a larger copy of the chart here)

APACs usually include your Director of Education and Student Experience, Education Support Team members and always an External Examiner from another University who checks our standards are appropriate. There are also Faculty-wide and University-wide APACs which ensure rules and regulations are being applied consistently within and between faculties.

You can read more on APACs and the processes which underpin the quality of learning and teaching at the University of Exeter in our Teaching Quality Assurance Manual here.

You can find out more about Mitigation here.