A prerequisite is a criteria which the student must meet in order to be allowed to attend the exam.
If the student is to fulfil a prerequisite for taking the exam, the teacher must approve that the requirement is met prior to the start of the exam.
A prerequisite might be submission or approval of an assignment, a product or the completion of a project prior to the exam.
If a student does not meet the prerequisite, he or she may not participate in the examination and uses an examination attempt. The prerequisite is not included in the assessment of the examination, but is a criteria for the student to take the exam.
At the Faculty of Arts, it has been decided that the prerequisite may only be used if they are strictly necessary for the completion of the exam, either because the course contains practical elements or collaboration with external parties.
These prerequisites are not included in the exam assessment process, but students have to comply with them before taking the exam in question. So the teacher must decide whether students have complied with the prerequisites as described in the academic regulations. The teacher should not assess the quality of the student’s work in complying with the prerequisites, because no criteria have been defined for this kind of assessment. The teacher only has to decide whether students have complied with the formal requirements stated in the prerequisites. For instance, teachers can refuse to accept that students have complied with the prerequisites if students submit an insufficient number of pages, or if they submit a report instead of an analysis. Students have failed to comply with the formal requirements in both cases. But on the other hand, the students may still gain approval of an analysis (even if it is a poor analysis) as long as it lives up to the formal requirements applying to an analysis.
