Exciting News from UCAS 9th December 2010
Meeting with Mr Richard Spencer of UCAS.
Miranda Jacobs and Derren Nesbitt travelled to Bath to attend a UCAS Tariff meeting with the head of UCAS, Mr Richard Spencer. At the meeting were representatives of various University admission staff. This meeting and others across the country is because UCAS is making radical alterations to the structure of UCAS as certain Universities pay great heed to them whilst other do not.
We learnt that one third of those awarding bodies applying for the UCAS Tariff have now been deigned.
We are please to relate that Mr Spencer at the start said he recognised both Miranda and my attendance and wanted to speak with us. We are extremely pleased to disclose that NEA will be announcing our position regarding the new UCAS Tariff during the first two weeks of January 2011 with Lamda and Trinity.
Derren whilst talking to various representatives who assess the admission or not of students to their university, it became clear to him that something is missing in the information they receive for making their decisions on each student. The reason being that the UCAS Tariff points is just a numeral, which does not indicate ‘what’ the student, or Learner has actually achieved to gain that particular number of points.
Consequently, the proposal is that when NEA issue a higher level certificate (bronze, silver or gold) we issue a document that relates exactly what that learner has achieved in order to gain that certificate and UCAS points. This document is then presented to the admissions officer at the relevant university so they see exactly what each learner has had to do to achieve the relevant UCAS points. Therefore, the Learner has a certificate and a document outlining their achievements.
This has received wholehearted support by the admissions officers’ at various University’s who take careful note of UCAS points in their admission policy, as being exceptionally useful in determining the qualifications of the proposed student to be able to gain admission to their University. I repeat: At the moment they just have a number of points that tells them very little intimate knowledge about each student, wanting to gain admittance to the University of their choice.