The Guild’s 2024 Accreditation Test will be made available to those members who are eligible to take it during the nine-day window period that will commence on 7 September 2024.

The registration form should be completed and emailed to the Accreditation Officer, Sharon Rose.

Eligibility

To be eligible to take the test, you must have been a Full or an Associate member of the Guild for at least 12 calendar months prior to the commencement of the test week – that is, to have been a member as at 6 September 2023 – and your membership must be paid up. Those who pass the test will be entitled to use the designation Accredited Text Editor (English) in association with their name.

Registration

Registration for the test opens on 1 March and closes on 1 September. The period leading up to 7 September will be taken up with the administration connected to the test, including agreeing on the dates and times of emailing the test to the candidates.

Fee for taking the test on its own

The fee for taking the 2024 Accreditation Test is R950,00.

Candidates who register to take the test will be required to provide the following strictly coded information when making payment: T24.membership number.surname, eg ‘T24.J043.Johns’.

Special offers on webinar+test combinations

This year, should you register and pay for all THREE Accreditation Test 2021 or 2022 webinars AND for the 2024 accreditation test in advance in one transaction, you will qualify for a 20% discount of R370: you pay R1 465 instead of R1 835.

This discount applies only to PEG members and only to an early-bird registration for the accreditation webinars.

Should you register and pay for the TWO Accreditation Test 2020 webinars AND for the 2024 accreditation test in advance in one transaction, you will qualify for a 20% discount on the total package: instead of 2 x R295 + R950 = R1 540, you receive a discount of R310. The total cost for the two accreditation webinars plus the accreditation test, paid for simultaneously, will therefore be R1 230.

This discount applies only to PEG members and only to an early-bird registration for the accreditation webinars.

Maintaining your ATE status

But please note that when your membership of the Guild lapses, you will lose your accreditation status; and when you rejoin PEG after a lapse, you will have to retake the test in order to regain your Accredited Text Editor status. Members who register for the Accreditation Test therefore implicitly agree to remain members of the Guild.

Accredited Text Editors will also be required to accumulate a minimum of 20 CPD hours per membership year (March–February) in order to retain their ATE status. These hours can comprise a minimum of 10 core hours and a maxmum of 10 discretionary hours (see the PEG website for more details).

How the test period will be organised and the test taken

In 2024, the nine-day window period for taking the test will be the period 7 to 15 September inclusive. When you register for the test, you will specify the day on which and the time at which you want to be sent the text (ie on any one of the days from 7 to 15 September). PEG’s Accreditation Officer will then email you the test on the appointed day and at the agreed time. From the time of receipt (which you will have to acknowledge and record on a form) you will have exactly 48 hours to complete and return the test questions you have answered. Any script received after the 48-hour period will be disqualified.

On the appointed day, together with the test, you will be sent a form on which you must:

• record the date and time you receive the test in your Inbox and the date and then time the test is completed;
• list the references/authorities you consulted while completing the test; you will be free to use any and all resources you may have available;
• sign a statement confirming that the work is entirely your own and that you did not consult another person while taking the test.

Return the signed form to the Accreditation Officer together with your completed test.

Your completed test will then be ‘anonymised’ (if necessary, any personal information will be replaced by a registration number as your unique identifier), in the interests of fairness, and then forwarded to the markers. Please do not write or type your name on any of the test documents. And please do not save the test script as a PDF. You may delete those questions from the script that you have chosen not to answer.

Should the markers’ independently arrived-at marks agree (both either a Pass or a Fail), the Accreditation Officer will be informed of the outcome and they will send you an email confirming the outcome. Individual marks will not be communicated and marked tests will not be returned. The marking process could take around three to four months.

Should the markers disagree about whether you have passed or failed, your questions will be submitted to an independent external moderator for their assessment, which will be final and binding. At this stage, there is no provision for an appeal process; the markers’ or moderator’s decision will be final.

Candidates who fail will have to retake the following year’s test.

Content and weightings

The Accreditation Test will focus on the English language; it is a ‘written’ test in which the majority of the questions will be completed onscreen in MS Word. The proofreading question is an exception: it will be emailed together with the test script as a separate PDF. You may either print it out and write your corrections on the printout (then scan the proofread document and submit it as a PDF) or make the required changes onscreen by using the correction and annotation functions in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

For the other questions, you are encouraged to use MS Word’s Track Changes and Comments functions where required to do so. Please follow the instructions about when to switch Track Changes on and off.

In line with the syllabus, the following knowledge and skills will be tested:

Section	Questions	Total	Pass
1.	English grammar/language, punctuation	25	20
2.	Structural, stylistic and copy editing	50	40
3.	Proofreading	25	20
4.	General (ethics, copyright/plagiarism, punctuation, plain language, etc)	20	16
TOTAL:		120	96
Reduced to 100%			80

Because PEG has to align the standard of its Accreditation Test with international benchmarks, the pass mark for each question and for the test overall has to be pitched at a comparable level. The final mark will be 100: to pass, a candidate must therefore have achieved an overall mark equivalent to 80% minimum plus a minimum of 80% in each of the four sections.

The English grammar question (question 1) is compulsory. There will be 20 sentences containing various errors that should be identified and corrected; in addition, there will be 10 multiple-choice questions in which the correct version among each set of sentences should be selected.

In section 2 (editing) there will be a choice of three questions to complete, representing different genres, one question always an academic text. In the case of the proofreading section 3, there is a choice between two questions: either a proofread of a text or a set of short questions relating to proofreading to answer. Candidates who choose to proofread the passage will be able to indicate the corrections either by using the pen-and-paper method of markup or onscreen using Adobe Acrobat Reader’s correction functions on the PDF supplied.

In section 4 there will be a choice of three questions on a wide range of general topics to respond to.

The range should help to ensure that candidates are able to respond fairly comfortably to at least one of them.

If you have any questions about the Accreditation Test, you should email the Accreditation portfolio holder on the PEG Exco, John Linnegar. Upon registration, any questions specific to the test itself should be directed at the Accreditation Officer.

We wish you success in taking PEG’s Accreditation Test 2024.