Quality Assurance & Assessment Policy

Scope of the Policy

This policy is provided for HICS Academy customers, students and employees members who are using or delivering courses and qualifications offered by HICS Academy.

Review arrangements

This policy will be reviewed annually in line with self-assessment arrangements by HICS Academy Student & Academic Affairs Unit (SAAU). This policy will be also be revised as and when necessary, in response to customer and learner feedback, or good practice guidance issued by an awarding organisation or other regulatory body.

Location of the Policy

This policy is available for all staff members, third parties and students to access.

Communication of the Policy

Every staff member involved in the management, delivery, assessment and quality assurance of qualifications offered by HICS Academy, shall be made aware of this policy during their induction period of employment. Students undertaking HICS Academy qualifications shall be informed of this policy during their induction process.

Policy Statement

Internal Quality Assurance (IQA) is concerned with monitoring the learner journey throughout their time undertaking a qualification at HICS Academy.

IQA involves monitoring the delivery and assessment activities and the quality of work students produce, in terms of meeting the correct grading criteria. Internal quality assurance helps to ensure that assessment and IQA activities are valid, authentic, sufficient, fair and reliable.

Internal quality assurance measures the quality, delivery, processes, procedures and learner achievements.

Statement of Principles

Key concepts and principles of internal quality assurance of assessment include:-

  • ensuring quality standards throughout the learner journey
  • ensuring accuracy and consistency of assessment decisions made by assessors
  • identifying issues and trends that develop
  • supporting and developing assessors and tutors
  • ensuring accountability for assessment decisions and quality standards, awarding body procedures and policies are maintained
  • ensuring achievement made by students and judged by assessors is recognised and meets the grading criteria
  • ensuring the correct and appropriate assessment strategies are used by assessors
  • ensuring confidently of the learner and provider are maintained at all times
  • ensuring sampling both interim and summative is occurring

Internal quality assurance principles include; ensuring standardization activities take place, assessment decisions embrace inclusion, equality is promoted with students and the diversity of students is valued by all staff. It ensures that fairness is apparent in all assessment decisions and that there are auditable records to show this.

IQA Activities

  • Service & Learning Delivery Infrastructure: Our IQA covers the monitoring of all infrastructure that facilitate delivery of learning objective to student. This includes the learning management system, virtual classroom, website, Student & Application Portals. The responsibility of this activity rest on the Head of IT.
  • Learning Materials Assessment: We carry out yearly review of materials recommended to student while they study at HICS Academy. This material includes the instructor’s note, reading material, and forum discussion topics. The responsibility of this activity rest on the Chief Instructor
  • Student’s Assessment: Assessing our student’s submission help us to determine the type of graduate we are producing. Our courses have two major form of student’s assessment and they include topic assignment and course final exams. Theoretical course are accessed using topic assignment and practical courses are assessed via course final exams. The course instructor assesses student’s assignment submission, the final exams is assessed by the automatically via the learning management system. Student’s assessment activity is supervised by the SAAU.
  • Student’s Attendance & Engagement:  As an online course delivery academy that offer virtual live class sessions as part of learning activity, a course coordinator is responsible for monitoring Realtime attendance of all live class session, discussion/class forum and assignment submission.
  • Instructor’s Delivery and Assessment: Our Learning Management System documents all learning activity during their studies. Our Virtual classroom platform records all live class session delivery. Both the learning activities in the LMS and recorded live session are review by the IQA & SAAU for quality assurance.
  • New course development: All new and reviewed courses under the HICS Cybersecurity Certificate program are designed and developed or reviewed by a Subject Matter Expert. However, the SAAU will supervise the review, development, or design of the course(s).
  • Academic Governance & Procedure: We have also document how specific request are processed towards ensuring that requests are processed timely and with standard.
  • Periodic Review: All courses, learning materials, learning activities, assessment (both instructor & student), policies & procedures are reviewed yearly.
  • Academic Improvement: We engage with our students, social media fan/follower and all possible channels of getting feedback regarding our services, courses & programs. This will enable us to review all possible feedback and action it accordingly.

 

Assessment Policy 

This policy documents how we engage in assessment of our students to enable us ascertain their level of knowledge acquired during their studies at HICS Academy

  • Assignment Assessment: Assignment are issued at the end of every topic and students are expected to submit the assignment after 7days. Our instructor will review the submission of student based on the topic assessment rubrics designed for the course.
  • Final Exams Assessment: We offer final exams to students enrolled in specific practical courses as a means of assessing their level of understanding in the course. Exams question type can be multiple choice, multiple response, open response, fill-in the blank, short text, or true/false. Our final exams are assessed by our learning management system automatically. Students who wish to request for manual assessment can make a request before the exams.
  • Attendance Assessment: Attendance of live class session is an important assessment student most fulfill to meet the graduation requirement. We assess attendance manually via the course coordinator that is always available during live class session to capture student’s attendance directly from the virtual classroom platform.

 

Signed:                     Hanniel H. Jafaru

Position:                  Director of Studies

Date:                          30th March, 2021

Signature:                Hanniel H. J