Provider name: Point Blank Ltd.
UKPRN: 10019178
7
the ‘soft skills’ that will be required in the workplace (I.e., communication skills, working in a team,
project management and prioritisation). This goes further in the collaborative projects for the core
modules. Core modules are shared across programmes and call for collaborative work to be carried
out within the assessments. This brings together students of all disciplines to work together, as they
would in industry, to create a professional standard product end-to-end.
There are also opportunities for students in different programmes to collaborate across modules and
programmes, including across the Higher Education and professional programmes. For example,
students on the BA(Hons) Music Industry Management programme collaborate with students on the
professional Music Production and Vocal Performance diploma in their Live Industry and Showcase
modules, respectively. This collaboration sees the curation, organisation, and operation of a
professional-standard live event, in which the BA(Hons) Music Industry Management students are
responsible for the budgeting; booking; venue liaison; health and safety; artist liaison; promotion;
and coordination of the event. Working with the professional students gives our HE students the
opportunity to develop the skills required to navigate the social and political aspects of working on a
live event and introduces them to the processes and realities of this type of environment.
We take clarity, transparency, and relevancy within the assessment and assessment processes very
seriously. Being a small, independent institution, we benefit from an agility which larger institutions
lack and so can respond to student feedback and action changes swiftly. In the 2020 NSS, students
noted that they did not always understand how some of the module assessments support their
professional development. To remedy this and better contextualise the assessments within our
students’ career aspirations, all assessment briefs now include a section on the purpose and context
of what they are required to do.
Our quality assurance processes within assessment and marking also work to assure our students
receive an outstanding experience. Each term, the Module Leaders run an assessment brief
calibration event, where all module lecturers get together to ensure they all approach the assessment
from the same perspective and agree on the approaches to support. They then hold marking
standardisation events at the start of the marking period, to establish the standards of work expected
within each grade level, per the grading frameworks of our regulations. At the end of the first marking,
all marking is then moderated by another internal party. The effectiveness of this is consistently
commended by our External Examiners, who have said the following in relation to our assessments
and marking:
“Assessment was fair, and there were numerous examples of assessment decisions being
challenged by the moderation process, and, in some cases, grades amended, showing the
process as a vital mechanism for maintaining appropriate standards: Moderation appeared
very robust.” External Examiner, Music Production and Sound Engineering, 2022).
“I did see an example where a moderator has submitted a change of grade backed up by
good arguments, which shows the robustness of the moderation and grading system”
External Examiner, Music Production and DJ Performance, 2022).
2.3 Academic Support
As noted in the Teaching section above, the delivery modes of the programme lend themselves
exceptionally well to tailoring academic support to individual students. For example, where a lecturer
identifies a gap in a student’s academic skills, or perhaps notices that a student is particularly anxious
about their academic skills, the lecturer can refer the student to academic skills workshops. These
workshops were developed following student feedback, and internal monitoring of student progress,
and were designed to mitigate the barriers many of our students face when it comes to accessing