Gathering evidence for Applied quality assurance
Evidence generated in the student’s preparation of an assessment response collected on or before the due date can be used to make a judgment. That means that teachers can make judgments on a draft if that is the only available assessment response evidence (see Section 8.2.7 Gathering evidence of student achievement of the QCE and QCIA policy and procedures handbook).
Note: Schools should only enter a not rated (NR) for a student if there is no evidence of any preparation of an assessment response (see Section 11.1.2 Determining results: Units 3 and 4 — overview of the QCE and QCIA policy and procedures handbook).
The school’s assessment policy sets out the school-based policies, procedures and strategies for managing response length and making judgments about student responses that exceed syllabus assessment conditions.
The assessment policy should be suitable for the school and assessment context and may include such strategies as:
- marking only the work that meets the assessment conditions for response length, excluding evidence outside the required length
- allowing the student to redact the work to meet the required length before a judgment is made on it.
Note: When marking student responses, schools cannot penalise students for submitting a response that does not meet the response length conditions by arbitrarily reducing their result by any number of marks or standard.
Further information about managing response lengths is available in Section 8.2.6: Managing response length of the QCE and QCIA policy and procedures handbook and in the School assessment policy resources in the Noticeboard app in the QCAA Portal.
Schools are expected to identify the characteristics of the student response matched to each criterion on the instrument-specific standards/marking guide. This can include by highlighting, circling, checking or otherwise clearly marking the match of the characteristics identified in the student response to the descriptors. The judgment for the overall standard (A–E) should also be clearly identified on the instrument-specific standards/marking guide, e.g. by circling the standard.
Schools are not required to remove annotations or teacher comments from student response samples. Reviewers will be directed to use the evidence in the student response and the school’s annotated instrument-specific standards/marking guide to make a decision for each sample.
Submitting evidence for Applied quality assurance
Information about submissions for Applied QA can be found in the Applied QA submission information factsheet in the Resources section of the QCAA Portal Syllabuses app.
The Applied QA app will not accept zipped files. For evidence of student responses that exceed the file size limit, schools should seek advice from their IT department about options to reduce file size that are compatible with their systems. For more information, see the Applied QA submission information factsheet in the Resources section of the QCAA Portal Syllabuses app.
To indicate the sampled student response, annotate the instrument-specific standard with a statement to identify the student response sample. For more information, see the Applied QA submission information factsheet in the Resources section of the QCAA Portal Syllabuses app.
- Last updated:
- 27 May 2026
