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Moderating Exam Questions Online

Hi, I’m Trish from Speedwell.  In this clip, we will be moderating marked short answer questions.

This moderator has logged on to the eSystem to check the exam marks.

So, from Exams, they select all exams with a status of mark.

The exams will appear on the right-hand side and we see the details here, including the number of questions and the number of candidates.

The moderator selects the exam and goes to Actions, then chooses Moderate.

At the top of the screen, we can see the exam details and on the right, we see the no of questions candidates and that the exam has been marked – the percentage shows as 100%. And we can see that we have also started moderating, a little more than 7% has been moderated already.

On the left-hand side, the moderator can move to the previous or next candidate like this.  And can select a question to moderate from the drop-down list, which confirms that this question has been 100 marked.

We have a list of candidates – a candidate in each row – and here we are only showing the candidate numbers. The M1 column shows the marks for each candidate from the first marker, then we see the marks for each candidate from the second marker.

And the 3rd column shows the average of these two marks which will be the average score unless the moderator overrides the score which would show here using moderation which they would switch on here.

The key at the bottom shows us who markers are, and explains what the column codes mean – average, overridden and moderated.

These two rows with highlighted averages show that a marker difference rule that I set has been breached.

Each organisation can set up their own rule for example marks must be within 20% here, and that’s why these average scores have been flagged for this exam, and the moderator will need to check them.

On the right-hand side, the moderator has three tabs that they can use; mark, questions and override.

On the mark tab, the moderator could place a pin, a highlight or a strike out using a colour of their choice on the candidate’s answer.  They could also add annotations or comments which would show on the right.

On the question tab the moderator can check the questions and the model answer again.

And use the override tab to adjust the score and add a justification if they wanted to.

This moderator goes back to mark and selects the first highlighted response.

On the right-hand side, the moderator checks the candidate’s answer, and any pins, highlights or strikeouts made by the examiners along with any attached notes which are listed on the right-hand side, along with any general comments.

The moderator could add marks, comments and notes of their own here.

They check the allocated examiner marks and, in this case, the moderator agrees that 2.5 is a fair score. And simply switches on Moderated in the top right.  So we can see that this response has been moderated, but the score hasn’t been changed.

The moderator selects the next highlighted response. They read the cand answer and check the purple pin that has been left by one examiner, and then the green highlight that has been left by another examiner and the attached note.

In this case, the moderator decides to override the average score. Here the score is out of 3.  And the moderator clicks into box and enters a score of 2.6.

The moderator types in a justification reason and saves by pressing Override Score & Save Justification.

This creates a permanent audit row showing the date, the moderator, the override score and the justification reason.

If the score needs to change or revert, the moderator simply types in the new score and adds a new justification which will create a new permanent row in the audit.

The moderator goes back to mark and switched Moderated on.  This shows that the response has been checked, the score has been overridden and it’s been moderated.

The percentage moderated in the top right has been updated.

The moderator may now moderate the other responses or finish and close the exam.