During any given year, TASC may ask schools to provide copies of documents such as:

  • policies and procedures related to the delivery and assessment of TASC courses
  • scope and sequence documents (and associated assessment matrices)
  • assessment records
  • attendance records
  • assessment tasks
  • examples of completed student work.

Schools need to archive – as per school-based policies/legal requirements – official records such as:

  • policies and procedures
  • assessment records
  • attendance records
  • records of reviews associated with Standards 6 and 8.

In some circumstances, TASC may ask to be provided with copies of such archived documents.

Generally, TASC would not ask for copies of student work completed in a past academic year unless this is specifically required within a specific course’s Quality Assurance (see below). In rare cases where a school requests a change to final internal results in the year after a qualification was issued by TASC such work may be requested as supporting evidence (see Standard 10).

Some TASC Level 2 courses have specific archiving requirements. These are noted in the course document’s Quality Assurance section. There are two (2) kinds of requirements:

1) Archived major folios of all learners: Some recently accredited Level 2 courses have the following requirement, “Providers must retain electronic copies of each learner’s major folio in a centralised storage system for three (3) years. TASC may require these to monitor the integrity of folios produced in other courses in subsequent years.”

In addition to retaining such folios of work it is expected that course providers will have documented processes that address issues such as:

  • how and when teachers of a course with this requirement are reminded that they need to capture the folios
  • how the folios will be captured (e.g. scanned, filing cabinet)
  • how the archive will be maintained (at school or faculty/department, not individual teacher level)
  • responsibilities for forwarding folios to TASC, if requested.

2) Archived Samples at borderline: Some Level 2 courses include in their Quality Assurance section the stated requirement for, “archived samples of individual student’s work sufficient to illustrate the borderline between that judged as an SA or PA award.” Each archived sample needs to:

  • be at the SA/PA (or in some cases SA/NN) borderline, not the borderline of higher awards as it is on this borderline that the contribution of a course to the TCE’s ‘everyday adult’ skill sets standards rests

  • of sufficient scope and depth that each sample can be used to make final assessment judgements against all the course’s criteria and – by application of the award algorithm – the final award that would be generated (i.e., each sample is a substantial body of work, not a single assessment task)

  • have notations regarding the final assessment ratings and the reasons for each.

In addition to such samples, it is expected that course providers will have documented processes that address issues such as:

  • how and when teachers of a course with this requirement are reminded that they need to capture such bodies of work when borderline cases are identified (so that arrangements can be made to collect/copy the work)

  • how the body of work will be captured (e.g., scanned, filing cabinet)

  • the need for notations about why the learner’s achievement was borderline, the final assessments, and the reasons for them

  • how the archive will be maintained (at school or faculty/department, not individual teacher level)

  • how the archive will be used.

While such archives allow TASC auditors to sample assessment processes and decisions made that directly impact on the integrity of the TCE, they also provide a rich source for:

  • within-provider moderation tasks

  • between-provider moderation tasks

  • the professional development of teachers new to a course

  • professional conversations about the application of standards

  • points of reference in making final assessment decisions for the same course in other cases/years.

The number of samples in an archive will depend on how many borderline cases have arisen in the time that the course has been offered by a provider. As a general guide, between four and six samples from the past few years would suffice if this number had naturally arisen in that timeframe.

It is recommended that providers offering a course for the first time or with limited samples investigate borrowing such samples from other schools/colleges so as to ‘seed’ their own archive and be able to make use of its intended purpose.

It is expected that assessment rubrics used to determine final internal ratings would make reference to the use of such an archive in making borderline assessment judgements in relevant courses.