Do the NEA tasks need to be completed in exam conditions?

No, NEA tasks do not need to be carried out in exam conditions. We do not require the internet to be disabled in the supervised classroom, and students may have access to their mobile phones. Work must be completed in the supervised sessions with enough supervision to make sure that it can be authenticated as the student’s own work.

Students can use their class notes, any research they have carried out (as identified in the set assignment) and they can also use textbooks. They must not write any response to the set assignment outside of supervised lessons. All work must be kept secure by the teacher, even if the work is saved to a cloud server.

It is important that students avoid plagiarism, make sure that they use references and reduce the risk of malpractice. To this end, students cannot share or discuss their work during the completion of the assignments. It would also be beneficial to remind students of the JCQ guidance around this. The guidance from JCQ about using social media is useful to share with students as well, as it reminds them to not share images of their work, details of the assignment and so on. See section 7.2 of the specification for more details about supervision.