Entitlement
The University will be holding 24 degree ceremonies in 2012. These will be held in 15 different locations. In principle, all OU students who have a qualification listed below are entitled to attend any one of these.
You do not have to attend a ceremony in the year you qualify. You can, if you wish, defer your attendance to a future year.
How will you know you are eligible?
If you are eligible for one of the qualifications listed under Eligible Qualifications, you will receive an invitation to book and pay for a place at a degree ceremony. We will notify you about this as soon as you receive your final course results and we have compared the credit you have obtained with the rules for the qualification. The large majority of course results, which stem from examinations and other end-of-course assessments in October, are announced in mid December. However, sets of results from smaller numbers of courses now appear at regular intervals throughout the year. Once you have become eligible to attend a degree ceremony, you should book and pay for it by logging onto your personal StudentHome page. If you do not receive an invitation, but believe you have obtained sufficient credit to to be eligible for a qualification, you should contact the Credit, Qualifications and Ceremonies Centre as soon as possible on +44 (0) 1908 653003 (see Checking your record).
If you are sitting your final examination in April, your ceremony invitation will be issued in late June, in time for you to book and attend one of our degree ceremonies held in the autumn. If the timing or location of these is not suitable, please look at details of the ceremonies to be held in the following year. You can view these dates by following the link on the ceremonies page. Please note that some of these dates are provisional and may therefore be subject to change.
Eligible Qualifications
Starting with our highest degree, all research degree graduates DLitt/DSc/PhD/DClin/EdD/MPhil/MRes) are eligible to attend a degree ceremony, as are all taught masters graduates (MA/MBA/MEd/MEng/MPA/MSc) and all bachelors degree graduates (BA/BEng/LLB/BSc). Foundation degree graduates are eligible as are those with a Diploma of Higher Education and the Professional GraduateCertificate in Education.
You can only attend a degree ceremony once for each degree. Therefore if you complete a BA or BSc without honours and choose to attend a ceremony at that stage, you will not be able to go again should you subsequently choose to do further study and progress to qualify for that degree with honours.
You must also have satisfied all of the University’s other administrative requirements before being eligible to attend a ceremony. For this reason, there needs to be a gap of at least four weeks between the receipt of your results and the date of your ceremony.
Checking your record
The only way we can identify whether you have qualified for a degree, diploma or certificate, is by checking your student record and matching the OU course credit and any transferred credit you have asked to be linked to it against the rules for the qualification. If some of your study is not correctly linked to the qualification you are aiming for, this is likely to mean that you are not sent any information about attending a degree ceremony. In some of these cases, by the time the problem is identified and resolved, all the places at the degree ceremony you wanted to go to may have already been taken. While this happens fairly infrequently, it is very disappointing to miss out on the opportunity to attend your first choice of ceremony. The onus is on you to ensure that the credit you have is linked to the qualification you want. If you have any doubts about this, you can check your record with student services either at your regional or national centre or at Milton Keynes. If you have internet access, you can also check your own student record at www.open.ac.uk/students. If you find it is not in order, there is a facility within the website for you to ask for changes. Do check and make any necessary amendments as soon as possible - if you don't, you may end up being unable to attend the degree ceremony you want.
With over 300 taught qualifications to choose between, it is neither possible nor appropriate for us to second-guess the qualification towards which you want your modules to count. You need to tell us this, and the easiest time for you to do so is when you reserve your place or register for each module you take.