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An increasingly regulated higher education sector is renewing its attention to those activities referred to as "moderation" in its efforts to ensure that judgements of student achievement are based on appropriate standards. Moderation practices conducted throughout the assessment process can result in purposes identified as equity, justification, accountability and community building. This paper draws on the limited studies of moderation and wider relevant research on judgement, standards and professional learning to test commonly used moderation practices against these identified purposes. The paper concludes with recommendations for maximising the potential of moderation practices to establish and maintain achievement standards.

Assessment practices that aim to promote both quality and equity may be compromised in a higher education market where students are consumers and grades the currency exchanged for measures of success. In such a climate, academics report feeling pressured to make course content and assessment less challenging in order to obtain positive student evaluations, and they may lose faith in university quality assurance processes that seem focused on ensuring student satisfaction with education as a product. To explore these issues from the perspectives of the main stakeholders in assessment, this paper investigates assessment perceptions of students, course coordinators, and faculty Associate Deans responsible for teaching and learning at The University of Queensland. The findings highlight differences in what these groups consider to be important assessment issues and differences in how they should be addressed. First year students are identified as a disadvantaged group due to perceptions of the role of feedback and formative assessment that may be influenced by their secondary school assessment experiences. (Contains 5 tables.)

"Critical thinking" is commonly included in the lists of graduate attributes (GAs), which all Australian universities are now required to develop and implement. That efforts to do so have met with limited success is due to a range of factors including inconsistent or naive conceptualisations, the failure to explicitly develop or assess GAs, and the persistence of "signature" disciplinary practices. This paper describes the design and implementation of a law course in which the development and assessment of critical thinking were core objectives. Key features of the course included an operational conceptualisation of "critical legal thinking", the development of closely aligned teaching and learning activities, and an aligned, coherent and innovative assessment programme. An evaluation of the first iteration of the course identified a number of successful outcomes as well as implications for ongoing course development.

Graduate attributes have received considerable attention in recent years as universities seek to renew and articulate their purposes. Though many claims are made with respect to the implementation of graduate attributes, there is growing acceptance of the proposition that the strongest evidence of their achievement is their explicit embedding in assessment. While university policies espouse the assessment of graduate attributes, studies have suggested that the effectiveness of this undertaking is often limited by the influence of a range of diverse but interrelated factors. This paper discusses these influential factors and argues that the assessment of graduate attributes is a complex issue that is unlikely to be resolved unless these factors are addressed at a systemic level. (Contains 1 figure and 1 note.)

Ongoing and rapid change is having a significant impact on the social and cultural contexts of assessment in higher education. Change and innovation have been driven not only by advances in our knowledge of effective practice but also by government policies, the latter often resulting in uncertainty regarding the freedoms and responsibilities of the academic role and erosion of professional confidence. As confidence is considered central to the ability to learn about and master new practices, understanding and enhancing this significant component of an assessment culture is therefore a fundamental challenge to institutional efforts to improve assessment practice. This paper reports the outcomes of an investigation of academic confidence, a preliminary "mapping" activity undertaken to inform plans for developing the assessment leadership capacities of course/subject coordinators. The investigation took the form of an online survey of all course coordinators. Outcomes include the identification of areas of high and low confidence and their correlation with demographic data such as length of experience. Open-ended comments provided rich qualitative data on possible reasons for high and low confidence. (Contains 2 tables.)

The plentiful and steadily increasing literature on teaching and learning in higher education has produced a number of helpful frameworks and guidelines that can be applied to the development and communication of assessment practice. The continued prevalence of much imprecise, unclear and otherwise confusing terminology around the discussion of assessment tasks, however, indicates the lack of a framework that facilitates understanding of individual task components. This paper describes an approach to addressing this gap in the literature through the development of an assessment task design framework drawn from systemic functional linguistics. To date, application of the framework has included the support of academics in "designing out" opportunities for plagiarism and the succinct description of assessment innovations. The paper concludes that the framework has the potential not only to underpin more purposeful design and analysis of assessment tasks but also to introduce academics to a vast but generally unfamiliar literature on the systematic development of academic communication skills and to encourage the critique of assessment as cultural practice. (Contains 2 figures.)

The assessment-related activities of academic development units (ADU) are driven not only by institutional initiatives and the pursuit of particular research interests but also by less predictable factors including the emerging needs of faculty members and external funding opportunities. When not located within a strong classification framework, institutional initiatives and the activities of ADUs can be experienced as fragmented and episodic events, a situation that denies participants and other stakeholders a sense of striving towards and achieving substantial goals. This paper proposes two classification frameworks--one for the organisation of the types of initiatives that universities commonly undertake in encouraging enhanced assessment practice and another for the functions of the ADU. Application of the two organisational frameworks offers a systematic approach to the development of institutional assessment plans and informs the ways in which the resources of the academic development unit can be deployed most strategically in their operationalisation. (Contains 2 figures.)

This paper reports the outcomes of a School of Law project undertaken in response to issues arising during the implementation of an institutional criterion-referenced assessment policy. The project involved the development of a set of generic assessment criteria and standards, or rubric, which could be customized to the requirements of individual law subjects. Of significance are the key decisions that shaped the generic resource and additional outcomes or byproducts of the project which include the professional learning experienced by individual members of the project working party and the identification of mutually reinforcing relationships between criterion-referenced assessment practice and other institutional policies and priorities. The paper concludes that analysis of project processes can produce findings whose value and significance are of equal interest to those resulting from implementation studies. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)