Assessing: whole school
Each school has responsibilities, under the guidance of the Principal, for assessment of School Certificate courses.
These include:
- establishing policies and procedures across the school that ensure a consistent approach
- ensuring that staff are fully aware of school assessment policies and procedures
- ensuring that students and their parents are fully aware of the assessment policies and procedures
- ensuring the valid distribution of grades in all courses and monitoring the grading determinations by individual teachers
- setting up procedures for dealing with appeals
- determining how comparability between different classes will be achieved
- establishing the method of recording and reporting assessment data.
The following school responsibilities relate to ensuring that there are consistent practices across faculties:
- ensuring that individual faculty members are fully aware of the assessment requirements for the Board of Studies, the school, and their faculty
- setting assessment activities based on syllabus outcomes (areas for assessment have been developed to group outcomes into a manageable form)
- ensuring that students are aware of the outcomes addressed in each activity
- ensuring that students are aware of criteria for assessing learning in each activity (and marking guidelines where appropriate)
- measuring student achievement in relation to outcomes
- recording observations using appropriate methods (such as marks, grades or comments)
- providing appropriate feedback to students on each activity
- making a judgement about each student's performance by mapping their achievements to a grade description at the end of Stage 5.