Moderation is used to ensure that assessment staff are making accurate and consistent judgements against the learning outcomes and assessment criteria, so that assessment judgements made for any learner are accurate, fair, and comparable with those made for all other learners.

Internal moderation is a process completed by the Centre before submitting the learners’ marks and work. Internal moderation helps Centre’s to be sure that every assessor is marking to the same standard.

This process is conducted by occupationally and technically qualified staff, where comparisons of judgements are made across assessors scoring/marking and /or grading of units.

The outcome of the Centre internal moderation process will be to provide confidence and confirm that assessments and judgements made by the assessor are being applied accurately and consistently, regardless of the identity of assessor, or learner.

Where appropriate, the Centre will report any features of the assessment set by the AO that may need to be reviewed because of the Internal moderation process.

The information gathered from the internal moderation process may provide typical information and indicators to present opportunities for improvements such as:

EAL provide marking schemes for some qualifications where appropriate, however there may be parts of the marking scheme that require the Centre to identify and agree a suitable answer/diagram/sketch appropriate to the assessment and ensure all staff and quality functions are standardised

There are qualifications where a Centre is required to create a suitable marking scheme as one is not provided by EAL. The Centre must identify and agree a suitable marking scheme appropriate to the assessment and ensure all staff and quality functions are standardised in the use of these marking arrangements.

The IQA must ensure this is in place and available to the delivery staff and moderators to ensure assessment decisions are accurate and consistent, and marking is fairly applied across learner.

The Centre moderator must ensure this is available before carrying out moderation, without the marking criteria the results may not be reliable.

For further guidance please refer to the EAL Centre Requirements for Moderation of Centre Marked Assessments document which you can find located in the Document Library in Smarter Touch.

Alternatively please contact your assigned EQA or our Customer Experience Team either on live chat, email: customer.experience@eal.org.uk, or phone: 01923 652400