A private candidate in the UK examination system is a person who enters an examination but is not enrolled as a student at the centre (school or college) where he or she sits the exam. They may have trained themselves for the exam or been taught privately or at an institution which is not a registered examination centre. Centres are not compelled to accept private candidates, and many do not.
The main English examination boards - AQA, OCR and Edexcel - all accept private candidates. AQA does not allow private candidates to sit their examinations outside the UK.
The Welsh examination board Welsh Joint Education Committee allows private candidates. The Northern Irish CCEA uses the term "external candidate" to refer to people in the same situation.
The international examination board CIE does not allow private candidates in the UK or USA.
Famous quotes containing the words private and/or candidate:
“For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“We have fought too much rhetoric and red tape to be lulled and comforted by a paid political advertisement showing a candidate tossing his grandchild in the air while a disembodied voice espouses “family values” in the background.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)