Accreditation
What is accreditation?
In almost every profession, one of the things that the professional bodies which regulate that profession do is check the quality of relevant degree programmes, and then accredit those programmes that meet their criteria. In computing, these activities are run by the British Computer Society (BCS), who accredit degree programmes as meeting the educational requirements for the various professional qualifications that they can subsequently award. Each of these qualifications also has requirements for professional experience, to be achieved once you have graduated, but knowing that your degree would meet the relevant educational requirements provides you with a guarantee that the degree programme is of high quality.
Which professional qualifications are relevant?
The BCS can award any of the following three professional qualifications.
- Chartered Information Technology Professional, which is the broadest one of the three, and is awarded by the BCS itself. This qualification entitles you to put the letters CITP after your name.
- Chartered Engineer, which the BCS awards on behalf of the Engineering Council to those who are working in areas such as software engineering. This qualification entitles you to put the letters CEng after your name.
- Chartered Scientist, which the BCS awards on behalf of the Science Council to those who are working in scientific applications of computing. This qualification entitles you to put the letters CSci after your name.
Accreditation of our courses
As part of these accreditation processes, an accreditation panel from the BCS visits the Department of Computer Science on a periodic basis. The most recent of these visits was at the end of November 2012, to review the accreditation of our degrees for the next five years. The panel was very impressed with the quality of our courses, and agreed to make the following recommendations to the BCS for the accreditation of our programmes. We expect these recommendations to be confirmed early in February 2013.
Because all three of the relevant professional qualifications require education to Master’s level in order to achieve them, each accreditation is at two levels. Simplifying slightly the terms that the BCS use to describe them, Bachelors degrees are accredited as partially meeting the requirements, and Masters degrees are accredited as meeting them fully. In each case, the versions of our degrees with Employment Experience have the same accreditation as the ordinary versions.
- Our Master’s level programmes in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, and Enterprise Computing fully meet all the requirements for all three of the professional qualifications.
Our Bachelor’s degrees partially meet the requirements for the various professional qualifications, as follows.
- Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, and Enterprise Computing all partially meet the requirements for CITP, CEng and CSci.
- Software Engineering partially meets the requirements for CITP and CEng.
- ITMB partially meets the requirements for CITP.
If you have any questions about the accreditation of our degree programmes, please contact our admissions team.
Click here for the British Computer Society web site.