What is Assessment Moderation?

Moderation is about quality assurance.

It’s a process helps ensure assessors at Registered Training Organisations (RTO) are making valid, reliable, flexible, fair and consistent assessment decisions.

Typically, it’s two or more assessors getting together during assessment to compare their findings about students’ assessments. If the assessors disagree (e.g. one assessor thinks the student is competent and the other thinks the student is not yet competent), then this highlights some potential issues.

The issues could be systematic (e.g. in the assessment tool, procedures, instructions) or it could be the result of other issues such as assessor bias.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) defines it as follows:

Ultimate, good moderation will bring to the surface important issues which can be addressed as part of your RTO’s quality improvement practices including:

• Do assessors need professional development on quality assessment practices?
• Do assessors need further training on assessment procedures?
• Are there issues with the assessment tools or procedures?
• Is our assessment system working as it should?

How do I conduct Assessment Moderation?

There are many ways to carry out moderation and firstly you need to check if your RTO has existing procedures and tools in place already. If not, you can use our free template provided at the end of this article.

Reviewing the template will help you understand the types of things you might address in a moderation – here’s an example:

It’s usually done as a meeting.

We often do it as a Zoom or Teams meeting at our RTO.

We recently conducted a Professional Development session for our RTO PD network on moderation, with a focus on ethics. You can check that out here including the session recording if you want to discover some more moderation tips and ideas.

Is there an Assessment Moderation Template I can follow?

Yes. You can use ours for free and you are welcome to adapt and modify however you wish. Please let us know if you have any suggestions or feedback on how we can improve this for others.

ASSESSMENT MODERATION TEMPLATE

To download the template simply select ‘File > Download’ then select your format (most common is Microsoft Word (docx)).

More Information

If you’re keen to learn more about moderation in RTOs, we cover that in our Certificate IV in Training and Assessment and TAE Diploma programs. Send us a message below to find out more.