Myths
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Every piece of student work needs to be verified.
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Not all standards need to be internally moderated.
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The Internal Moderation Cover Sheet must be used to document internal moderation.
- If I don’t have another subject expert in my school, I can ask any teacher to moderate the work.
- I don’t need to critique tasks from NZQA, MOE, or subject associations.
- We need to moderate 6 samples for each standard.
- If I have experience with the standard, I don’t need to get my marking moderated.
On this page
Facts
- Internal moderation ensures that assessment materials meet the standard and that teacher judgements are consistent across tasks, classes, and years.
- Every internal standard must be moderated, for every assessing teacher, every year.
- Schools must report only those internal assessment results which have been subject to an internal moderation process.
- Each critiquer must be an assessment expert, preferably with subject or standard-specific expertise.
- Each verifier must be a subject expert with recent standard-specific experience. This could be from within or beyond the school.
- The internal moderation process must include critiquing, verifying and monitoring:
- Critiquing the assessment activity before use ensures it is suitable for the standard, students, and conditions of assessment. All assessment activities must be critiqued regardless of their origin. This includes checking current assessor support.
- Verifying teacher judgements ensures that they are consistent with the standard. A sufficient sample of student work for each teacher must be strategically selected. The number of samples for each teacher will vary depending on the experience of the teacher, previous moderation history and the student cohort.
- Monitoring the completion of moderation processes. Schools can choose how to document internal moderation, including using NZQA's Internal Moderation Cover Sheet, using a digital or paper method, or using a process embedded in the school’s student management system. Monitoring includes checking that:
- reasons for selecting student work are recorded
- assessor grade, verifier grade, and final grade are all recorded
- any change to any assessor or verifier grade is explained
- moderation records are retained, including verification comments for the current year and the years since the last Managing National Assessment (MNA) review
- assessment material is retained for the current and prior academic year in case it is requested for external moderation, and for future reference and decision making. Samples should be regularly updated and must be accessible even if teachers change.
- Schools should review the quality of the internal moderation process and resolve any identified issues. Review may include:
- the appropriateness of the verifier
- the quality of the assessment task
- the teacher’s access to resources or professional networks
- patterns of inconsistency between assessor, verifier or external moderator grades that persist over time.
More points about internal moderation
You can get a better understanding of the national standard through:
- asking your School Relationship Manager to help you find a suitable verifier
- using material on the subject pages on NZQA's website, such as the clarification documents, annotated exemplars and National Moderators’ reports
- accessing Pūtake (NZQA's Learning Management System), for the Assessor Practice Tool, standard-specific courses and general assessment practice courses
- using Ministry of Education or commercial assessment resources
- seeking support from professional groups such as subject associations
- referring to benchmark samples from previous years to maintain consistency.