The School has a robust internal and external moderation system, which we have for reasons of best practice and QA compliance. For details on external moderation, please see Section 2.7 External Examining.
Internal moderation is the School’s key internal mechanism that ensures grades awarded to students are consistently applied across the course. The aims of internal moderation are:
- to ensure an assessment has been graded in line with the stated assessment criteria;
- to assure internal consistency of assessment within a course;
- to provide assurance for students of fairness and equality of grading for all students.
Choosing the sample to be moderated
Moderation takes place for both original and retrieval assessments. A minimum of 10% of the assessments will be sent to the designated internal moderator. This sample should include all fails, all borderline pass cases (e.g. with a score 50-52 out of 100), a selection of the highest grades awarded and a random selection of the remaining assignments. At times, this may mean that the selection is greater than 10%. Moderators should also be provided with the grade sheet to enable them to see the spread of grades across the course.
Who can act as an internal moderator?
The internal moderator should be from the same subject area as the course leader.
The role of the internal moderator
They are required to familiarise themselves with the stated assessment, and assessment criteria prior to reviewing the students’ assessments. Once they are familiar with the assessment, the role moderator will review the students’ assessments and the grades provided and determine if overall the grades are fair and consistent across the sample provided.
They will be asked to confirm the following:
- Grades are fair and consistent across the course, or
- It is recommended that all grades be increased by (x)% because…, or
- It is recommended that all grades be decreased by (x)% because….
The moderator may not suggest amendments to an individual student’s grade, as this would not be fair to other students that were not included in the sample, therefore they may only comment on the sample as a whole. Any suggested amendments would need to be applied to the whole class.
The moderator should provide a reason for any suggested grade amendments. In cases where the course leader and the moderator do not agree on the suggested amendment, the Subject Area Chair and/or Academic Director will be asked to take a final decision.
Where grading is completed by a Teaching Assistant, faculty remain ultimately responsible for ensuring that grading is correct and should check, at minimum, all fails as well as those students who fall either side of the grade boundaries.
