Planning a competency-based term.
A competency-based term hands you six months, a list of courses and no due dates at all. Students who thrive in it are almost never faster learners than the ones who do not. They are the ones who spent an hour in week one inventing the deadlines the model deliberately left out.
Written by Séamus CallaghanMSc IT · senior mentor · 2026-06-09
Nothing is late until everything is
This is the defining property and the whole difficulty. Because no individual task is overdue, nothing generates urgency, and a term can pass in a fortnight of steady intention. Then it is month five and the arithmetic gets unpleasant very quickly.
The model is genuinely excellent for people with real prior knowledge — you demonstrate what you already know and move on rather than sitting through it. It is punishing for people who need external structure, and needing external structure is extremely normal rather than a personal failing.
Build the calendar in week one
Put every competency unit for the term against the actual weeks you have, and be honest about which weeks are already spoken for by work, family or anything else you know is coming.
Then order the courses deliberately rather than alphabetically. Courses that share underlying material should sit next to each other so you learn it once and use it twice, and anything with a proctored assessment wants scheduling well before the end of the term rather than in its final fortnight.
- ✦Every unit against a real week, with the busy weeks marked first
- ✦Courses ordered so overlapping material is learned once, not twice
- ✦A target submission date for each task, set by you and treated as fixed
- ✦Enough slack that one returned task still fits inside the term
- ✦Proctored assessments booked early rather than left to the last weeks
Write to the aspects, not to the topic
Performance tasks are assessed aspect by aspect, and each lettered requirement is checked independently rather than the submission being judged as a whole. This is why genuinely good writing gets returned: a submission can cover everything implicitly and still fail an aspect that was never explicitly addressed.
So answer in the order and the language of the aspects themselves. It feels inelegant compared with how you would write an essay elsewhere, and it is what this format rewards. If aspect B2 asks you to justify your selection of the instrument, there should be a passage that visibly justifies your selection of the instrument.
Assume one return, and plan for it
Tasks come back. It is routine rather than a judgment, and evaluators name exactly which aspects were not met. What it costs is calendar time, and in a term of fixed length calendar time is the scarce resource.
The habit that protects you is submitting early enough that one full return-and-resubmit cycle still fits. Students who submit a task in the final week of a term have removed their own margin, and a return then means carrying the course into a term they have to pay for.
Use the pre-assessment properly
For objective assessments the pre-assessment is the most useful document you will get, and most students glance at the score and ignore the breakdown. The breakdown tells you which competency areas are weak, and revision should follow it rather than following general reading.
Allocate hours by how much of the assessment each area carries, work the weak areas first, then practise under timed conditions. If you score well untimed and badly against the clock you have a pacing problem rather than a knowledge one, and more revision will not touch it.
Where the planning itself is the part you cannot make yourself do, that is the first thing handing over a competency term produces: the calendar comes before any writing does.
Questions this raises.
How many courses can I realistically finish in one term?
It depends far more on prior knowledge and available hours than on ability. Students with genuine background in the subject move very fast because they are demonstrating rather than learning. Students meeting material for the first time should plan conservatively, and either way it is better to plan for fewer and add than to plan for more and stall.
Is acceleration worth chasing?
It is what makes the model cheap, since you pay by term rather than by course. But acceleration achieved by submitting weak work produces returns, and returns cost the calendar time acceleration was supposed to save. The students who genuinely accelerate submit solid work early rather than rushed work often.
What if I fall behind my own plan?
Re-plan rather than abandon the plan, which is what usually happens instead. Recount what is left against the weeks remaining, drop a course to the next term deliberately if the arithmetic says so, and protect the ones you can still finish. A plan revised in month three is useful; a plan ignored from month two is how terms end with nothing completed.
Séamus Callaghan
MSc IT · senior mentor. Writes for the dispatch on what actually moves marks in this subject, and coaches the students who bring it to the guild. The rest of the guild.
Where to go from here.
Tell the guild your tale.
Name the course, the program and the date it is due. A mentor credentialed in that subject reads it and replies with counsel and a figure within two hours. The reading costs nothing, and sometimes the answer is an honest no.
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