Writeiq for faculties
Moderation is how a faculty shows its judgements mean the same thing in every classroom. Writeiq gives every marker the same criteria, the same evidence and a blind second read – and leaves the final score exactly where it belongs, with the teacher.
Read the Moderation Protocol →Every English faculty knows this problem. The same essay marked by two experienced teachers can land a band apart, and neither of them is careless. They are weighting criteria differently, holding different exemplars in their heads, and reading the twentieth script of the evening rather than the first.
That is what moderation exists to correct, and it is why every Australian jurisdiction expects it. The difficulty is never the principle. It is that moderation is a meeting – and meetings are slow, hard to schedule across a faculty, and produce agreement that lives in somebody’s memory rather than in the record.
The question a Head of English has to answer is not “is this piece a 4?” It is “would this piece be a 4 in every class in my faculty?” Those are different questions, and only the second one is about moderation.
From the marking queue, send any marked piece to a year-level peer. They mark it blind – your scores are hidden from them – so the second read is genuine rather than anchored to yours. Use it for borderline scores, before parent-teacher conferences, or whenever you want a colleague’s read.
Every piece is read against the same criteria, dimension by dimension, whoever marks it. The faculty stops comparing general impressions and starts comparing the same named criterion – which is a much shorter conversation.
Change any criterion score you disagree with. The original is retained with a strikethrough, your adjustment is flagged, and your reason is logged. A moderation decision becomes part of the record instead of a conversation nobody wrote down.
Teachers compare their own classes side by side; leadership sees every class against the cohort. If one class sits consistently higher on a criterion, that is the prompt to ask whether marking needs calibrating or whether that teaching is worth sharing.
Each judgement carries the criterion it was made against and the evidence behind it, aligned to IWAF 3.0. A moderation conversation can go to the specific line in the script rather than to a general sense of the piece.
Dated, criterion-level and exportable. Useful when a result is questioned by a parent, when a faculty is asked to show how it moderates, and as evidence in an NCCD portfolio alongside the Moderation Protocol.
The order matters here, because the blind step is the one that makes the round worth running at all.
A class task is marked and confirmed by its teacher. Nothing about moderation changes how the first read happens.
Selected pieces – typically borderline ones, or a sample across the range – go to a year-level peer. The first marker’s scores are hidden from them.
Where the two reads agree, that is evidence the standard is shared. Where they diverge, the disagreement is located at a named criterion rather than at the piece as a whole. And where two markers disagree with each other, that is a calibration issue among staff rather than a Writeiq one – which is the most valuable thing a round can surface, because it is invisible in day-to-day marking.
The faculty settles the score. Any adjustment carries its reason into the record, so next year’s conversation starts from this year’s decision.
This section exists because moderation is exactly where an assessment tool is most tempted to overclaim, and where a faculty is most entitled to be sceptical.
The teacher-confirmed score is the only official record. Writeiq never marks in a teacher’s place, and nothing a teacher has confirmed is changed by anything downstream. It is designed to give a defensible starting point, not a final ruling.
Cross-class comparison shows classes pooled as they were marked. A hard-marking class and a lenient one are not corrected for, which is why cohort ranking is indicative and labelled that way everywhere it appears. A per-class severity model is designed but deliberately not built: it would have nothing to estimate from until schools have run real moderation rounds.
VCAA’s process, and the equivalent in every other state, is theirs. This is an internal faculty aid for keeping teacher judgement consistent. It claims no parity with a statutory process and should not be presented to a school as one.
Writeiq reports per-school agreement between its analysis and teachers’ confirmed scores, but that report is empty by design until a school completes blind moderation rounds, because only blind evidence counts. We would rather show an empty table with an honest reason than a number we cannot stand behind. When your rounds populate it, the figure is yours, and it is about your faculty.
Moderation is the part of assessment where trust is actually won or lost. A faculty will forgive a tool that is occasionally wrong about a script. It will not forgive one that quietly overrides a teacher, or that reports a consistency it has not measured.
So the design rule is simple. Writeiq contributes a consistent first read and the evidence behind it, the faculty contributes the judgement, and every disagreement is recorded rather than smoothed away. Writeiq is built for Years 3 to 12 and is currently in pilot with an Australian secondary school, where blind moderation rounds are building the published evidence base.
If moderation is the problem you are trying to solve, that is the conversation we would rather have – including where Writeiq is not the right fit.