SecQual

External Moderation Reports
S2011/025 - 08 Jun 2011

External Moderation Reports

Over the past few years, NZQA has issued guidelines to its moderators to ensure consistency between subjects when reporting.  This should make it easier for schools to look across subjects and make comparisons. A moderation report is prepared on a very small sample of student work.  It should not be used for appraisal purposes because of this. However, it may indicate that further attention or investigation is required in a particular subject. 

Overall qualitative comment

In 2011, a qualitative comment which refers to assessment judgements has been added to support the reporting of a quantitative score and make it more meaningful.  The moderator will be saying if they are confident, highly confident or cannot express confidence.  The latter is always explained with a reason.

In the past, the comments related to assessment decisions were quantitative only and referred to how many of the assessment judgements moderators agreed with.  However, this was not always an adequate indication of how confident the moderator was in the decisions being made. For example, it is possible for the moderator to agree with 8 out of 8 assessment judgements but still not be confident because all of the grades verified were Not Achieved grades.  Likewise the moderator may agree with only 2 out of the 8 assessment judgements but still be very confident in the assessor’s judgements because the difference all related to the same minor issue repeated for all 6 students, or because  the fault related to the assessment schedule. 

Resubmission of assessment materials

Moderators may also request schools to resubmit assessment materials.  A resubmission is only offered where an administrative error means that the moderator cannot verify the assessor decisions.  Illegible handwriting, electronic files that can’t open, corrupted or unformatted DVDs, poor photocopying or a mismatch between the activity and the student work supplied may result in a school being asked to resubmit assessment materials.

Moderators will write as complete a report as they can but the school may be offered an opportunity to resubmit the materials at a later date so a full moderation report can be completed.  This opportunity is not intended to be used as an option to change assessment decisions. 

If a teacher is not satisfied with their moderation report they should use the moderation appeal process.

Optional teacher selected evidence

Schools may send in materials for moderation in standards that they have concerns about.  They may use the Optional Teacher Selected Evidence process to seek feedback from the moderator on a specific assessment issue for a standard.

Enquiries

Please refer any enquiries relating to this circular to your School Relationship Manager.