Each year the QCAA reviews tens of thousands of student responses to internal assessment to ensure the marks allocated by teachers are fair, reliable and comparable across Queensland schools. This video explains the confirmation process.
Video transcript
Each year, thousands of senior students do three internal assessments in General and General (Extension) subjects.
The QCAA endorses them before use in class.
Teachers mark students’ responses using the instrument-specific marking guide in the subject syllabus and provide a provisional mark.
Schools then submit these provisional student marks for each assessment to the QCAA.
To ensure these results are fair, reliable and comparable across schools, the QCAA uses a process called confirmation.
We select the student samples to review, ensuring a range of marks are considered.
The number of samples varies depending on the size of the cohort, the provisional marks and the assessment.
After the samples are identified, schools upload the student work along with the ISMG showing how teachers made provisional mark judgements.
About 3000 experienced teachers from schools all over Queensland work as assessors to review these samples of work.
We review about 150,000 student assessment responses from schools per year.
Lead and chief confirmers review the assessors’ work as the final quality assurance step.
These review decisions are then analysed to determine the level of agreement with the school’s provisional marks. If a cohort pattern can’t be determined, we review more student responses from the school before the results are confirmed.
Once a clear pattern is identified, students’ results in that assessment are finalised.
Confirmation outcomes show teachers in Queensland mark students’ work with a high level of consistency and accuracy.
The QCAA gives schools a report showing each student’s confirmed result before it is published in a student’s learning account in the Student Portal. This lets teachers consider any mark movements and seek further advice from the QCAA, if needed.
A school may request a review of a confirmed result after talking with the student and their parent or carer. An additional independent review then takes place and marks may be adjusted or stay the same. The outcome is final.
At the end of the school year, the QCAA combines a student’s confirmed results in each summative internal assessment with their external assessment result to give a final subject result out of 100 and a grade from A to E.
- Last updated:
- 24 April 2023
