Assessment

Authentication

Teachers should have in place strategies for ensuring that work submitted for assessment is the student’s own. Where aspects of tasks for school-based assessment are completed outside class time teachers must monitor and record each student’s progress through to completion. This requires regular sightings of the work by the teacher and the keeping of records. The teacher may consider it appropriate to ask the student to demonstrate his/her understanding of the task at the time of submission of the work.

If any part of the work cannot be authenticated, then the matter should be dealt with as a breach of rules. To reduce the possibility of authentication problems arising, or being difficult to resolve, the following strategies are useful:

• Ensure that tasks are kept secure prior to administration, to avoid unauthorised release to students and compromising the assessment. They should not be sent by mail or electronically without due care.
• Ensure that a significant amount of classroom time is spent on the task so that the teacher is familiar with each student’s work and can regularly monitor and discuss aspects of the work with the student.
• Ensure that students document the specific development stages of work, starting with an early part of the task such as topic choice, list of resources and/or preliminary research.
• Ensure that copies of each student’s work is filed at given stages in its development.
• Regularly rotate topics from year to year to ensure that students are unable to use student work from the previous year.
• Where there is more than one class of a particular study in the school, the VCAA expects the school to apply internal moderation/cross-marking procedures to ensure consistency of assessment between teachers. Teachers are advised to apply the same approach to authentication and record-keeping, as cross-marking sometimes reveals possible breaches of authentication. Early liaison on topics, and sharing of draft student work between teachers, enables earlier identification of possible authentication problems and the implementation of appropriate action.
• Encourage students to acknowledge tutors, if they have them, and to discuss and show the work done with tutors. Ideally, liaison between the class teacher and the tutor can provide the maximum benefit for the student and ensure that the tutor is aware of the authentication requirements. Similar advice applies if students receive regular help from a family member.