Quality assurance of assessment through consensus moderation: A reporting framework for institutional engagement

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for Quality Assurance of Assessment.

The framework:

•provides a common basis for institutions to implement, monitor and improve practices that ensure the quality of student learning and its assessment; •ensures that academic standards are embedded in the institutional activities academics and students experience throughout their teaching and learning. i.e as an integral, systemic and axiomatic outcome, not through corrective action after-the-fact; •endorses processes that place responsibility and authority for expert judgment about the quality of students’ learning firmly with the academics who are the experts in their fields; •supports intra and inter-institutional collegial exchange, that places the achievement of informed consensus at the heart of a system that achieves quality; •offers an approach to cross-institutional benchmarking of standards, and; •delivers numerical metrics that respect institutional and disciplinary differences, and yet yield meaningful comparative data.