The Oral Presentation That Wasn't Recorded
Ana is a Year 12 Portuguese continuers student at a SACE school. Her school-assessed oral presentation, worth 20% of her internal grade, was scheduled for Tuesday. On Monday she emailed her teacher saying she had laryngitis and attached a doctor's note covering Monday to Wednesday. The teacher rescheduled her to the following Monday. On that day Ana presented, but the teacher's recording device failed and only a handwritten note of the marks remains. The teacher had already marked three other students that week using the same rubric. Ana's written work is consistently A-grade; her previous oral task scored a C. The teacher now has to decide what mark to submit and what evidence to keep, knowing moderation may request samples.
1. What should the teacher do about the missing recording, and why does it matter for this assessment type?
Read the worked answer
The teacher should treat the missing recording as an evidence problem, not a marking problem. The oral is a performance assessment; SACE moderation relies on comparable evidence, and a handwritten mark sheet with no recording is weak evidence if the sample is selected.
Reasoning steps:
- The mark itself can stand if the teacher marked live against the rubric at the time - the judgement was made on observed performance.
- But the teacher should document the circumstances (device failure, date, rubric used, criteria scores per descriptor) in a file note signed and dated.
- The teacher should check school policy: many schools require audio recording of oral performances precisely so moderation can occur. If recording is mandatory, the teacher may need to arrange a re-performance or accept that this task cannot be used as a moderation sample.
- Ana should not be penalised for the school's equipment failure. A re-record is fairer than a guess.
- The teacher must not inflate the mark to match Ana's written A grades - oral and written are separate capabilities and the rubric, not the student's profile, governs.
2. Ana's written work is A-grade but her oral history is a C. How should the teacher resist adjusting the mark upward?
Read the worked answer
The teacher should mark what was performed, not what was expected. Two pressures push toward inflation: the student's strong written profile, and the awkwardness of a lost recording.
How to resist:
- Re-read the rubric descriptors and match the observed performance to them, criterion by criterion, writing a one-line justification for each score.
- Compare against the three students marked that week using the same rubric - this anchors the judgement to a distribution rather than to Ana's reputation.
- Separate the two issues: the evidence gap is an administrative problem solved by documentation or re-recording; the mark is a judgement problem solved by the rubric.
- If the teacher genuinely cannot recall the performance well enough to defend the mark, a supervised re-performance against the same task is the honest remedy - not a sympathetic upgrade.
- Record the rationale so that if moderation queries the mark, the reasoning is visible and consistent.