Higher Education Monitoring and Moderation of Grades Policy

Purpose

The purpose of this policy is to ensure that Alphacrucis University College (AC) maintains an appropriate level of quality and consistency in Higher Education (HE) subject grades allocated to ensure high academic standards and integrity of awards.

Scope

This policy applies to all students enrolled in, and all staff involved in the delivery of coursework subjects in Higher Education (HE).

Policy

GLOSSARY

Moderation, internal and external, is a collegial academic quality assurance process where faculty review aspects of assessment, usually grading and feedback, to ensure their validity, reliability, and consistency, as integral to academic standards and the integrity of awards.

Calibration is a process of peer review carried out by members of a disciplinary and/or professional community who typically discuss, review, and compare student work to reach a shared understanding of the academic standard which such work needs to meet.  

 

PRINCIPLES

Principles:

• Assessment design and practices are appropriate to the AQF level and subject to ensure academic standards are maintained;
• Assessment tasks are graded against a marking scheme (rubric) that is consistent with the learning outcomes and assessment criteria;
• Moderation facilitates the commitment of AC to academic quality assurance and continuous improvement of awards and subjects;
• Moderation of assessment helps establish comparability of standards of student performance across different markers and locations. However, moderation is only one part of a broader approach to assure standards in a subject;
• Moderation facilitates high quality assessment practices by assisting faculty to make assessment judgements that are valid, reliable, and consistent, and actively improve learning and teaching;
• Moderation of assessment should occur in a timely manner following completion of marking, and should not significantly delay the provision of results or feedback to students;
• Internal post-assessment moderation of higher education programs is conducted for each subject every time it is delivered, to ensure consistency in assessment contributing to a student’s final grade in a subject;
• External post-assessment moderation of higher education subjects must be conducted as part of a scheduled external review and moderation process, to ensure consistent and appropriate standards of assessment for the relevant Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) level of the course of study. A record of external moderation will be maintained by the Learning and Teaching Committee in an External Moderation register.

 

POLICY

Internal Monitoring of Grades

Grades for student assessment should be awarded by faculty and differentiated in accordance with the Grading Policy. Faculty are to submit final grades by the date set by the Learning and Teaching Committee (or delegated representative) each teaching period so that grades can be reviewed through the process of internal monitoring of grades and sent to students in a timely manner.

Examples of internal moderation processes include:

• Involving all teaching staff in a unit in the development and review of rubrics;
• Cross marking/grading with follow-up meetings for discussion and comparison;
• Using one teacher to mark/grade all responses to a particular part of an assessment task (e.g., a section of an examination paper);
• Holding moderation meetings to confirm consistency of marking/grading across teachers; these meetings could involve:
  • discussing difficulties encountered when making judgments, for example, interpreting a standards descriptor.
  • developing solutions to these difficulties, such as altering the rubric to account for unforeseen and unintended student interpretation of wording.
  • reviewing student responses and profiles of their results, in instances where there appears to be significant differences in marking/grading - this can assist teachers in fine-tuning their judgments so that they are in line with other teachers' judgments.

 

External Moderation of Grades

External Moderation of Grades is used to ensure that grade allocations are consistent, valid and reliable. The process establishes and promotes standards and equity at the appropriate level in each subject, and ensures comparability in quality between other institutions teaching comparable courses.

AC requires that:

1. Learning and Teaching Committee takes responsibility for implementing and overseeing appropriate mechanisms for external moderation of grades. The Learning and Teaching Committee will determine subjects to be moderated on a risk-based, systematic approach.  Subjects to be moderated will be determined by stakeholder data, usually student and faculty feedback, indicating academic risks associated with a particular subject, which require external moderation to mitigate risk. Other subjects will be determined as high priority for moderation based on factors such as changes actioned as a result of course review and re-development, implementation of new subjects, or special electives.
2. Learning and Teaching Committee will ensure that moderation activities are completed and required changes or continuous improvements are actioned.

Supporting guidelines

The Australian Qualifications Framework | AQF

Responsible for implementation

Chair, Learning and Teaching Committee

Key stakeholders

All faculty and students

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Procedures

Higher Education Monitoring and Moderation of Grades

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