Certification Bodies Editing and Proofreading Services

A certification body's product is a claim about a person: that they can do something to a defined standard. Everything else — the syllabus, the training market, the employer recognition, the fees — rests on whether that claim holds. It is tested every time a certified individual performs badly in front of an employer, and it is tested formally whenever a candidate challenges a result. Both tests come back to the same documents: what the standard says, and whether the questions actually measured it.

We edit what certification and awarding bodies produce — occupational and competence standards, syllabus and specification documents, examination items and item banks, marking schemes and rubrics, item writer guidance and training material, practical and performance assessment briefs, assessor and examiner guidance, standard-setting and pass mark documentation, candidate handbooks and examination regulations, reasonable adjustment and access arrangement policies, results, appeal and enquiry-about-results correspondence, malpractice policies and investigation documentation, recertification and continuing competence requirements, and accreditation submissions to regulators. Our editors check that a question tests the standard it is mapped to.

Item writing is where certification succeeds or quietly stops meaning anything, and the failure modes are consistent enough to be checked for. Items that test recall where the standard requires application; stems that give the answer away through grammatical agreement or length; distractors so implausible that the item measures reading speed; negative phrasing that catches out competent candidates who read quickly; and questions where the correct answer depends on a jurisdiction, a version or a convention the syllabus never specified. We work through item banks flagging each of these, and we check the mapping — that an item claiming to test a standard about judging when to escalate is not in fact testing whether the candidate remembers a number. We also work on the marking scheme, because an item can be sound and still produce inconsistent results if the scheme leaves markers to decide what counts. Defensibility at appeal comes from these documents, not from the examination process around them.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including live item banks and material under embargo. We are editors rather than psychometricians or subject experts, and we offer no view on the correctness of any item, the standard-setting process, or any result or appeal. What we can do is make items clear and unambiguous, and standards precise enough to write items against.