Guidance for students and families
According to SACE, the term drafting refers to the practice of rewording, restructuring, or redesigning a piece of work for the purposes of improving it. Drafting occurs during an interim stage of development as a result of critical appraisal of the work by another person, commonly the teacher, or after reflection by the student. Thus, drafting a piece of work (e.g. an extended piece of writing) is undertaken before the teacher or assessor has assessed it.
A student may redraft a document many times. However, the number of times the student can submit a piece of work to the teacher for feedback before it is formally assessed depends on a number of circumstances, including, for example:
- Specifications in the relevant subject outline (e.g. in some assessment tasks, a student may
- Submit a piece of work to the teacher for feedback only once), and/or
- Specifications in the relevant subject operational information, and/or
- Assessment design of the task as determined by the teacher.
When a subject outline does not specify conditions about drafting, the teacher determines the number of times a student can obtain feedback before the piece of work is formally assessed. There is no expectation to offer students in Year 7-10 formal drafting, although they are entitled to ask questions for improvement.
At Westminster School, all students will have an entitled to have their work drafted and to have feedback published on SEQTA. Drafting can take the form of written feedback and verbal feedback.
For Stage 1 and 2 SACE this cannot breach the SACE Guidelines and for Year 7-10s the wording from the SACE guidelines are pertinent:
Levels of intervention by teachers and others
- Common principles of fair practice must be followed in determining the nature of the interventions that teachers and other people make where student work is prepared and presented for assessment.
- As a ruling principle, all changes made in the various stages of development of written or other products or performances submitted for assessment must represent students’ own work.
- It is acceptable in the developmental stages of an assessment task for the teacher to ask questions and to offer general advice — for example, about alternative strategies that might be tried. The teacher should not dictate or make specific changes in such a way as to put into question the student’s authorship or ownership of that particular piece of work.
- Where alterations have been written into work or work has been changed by the teacher in other ways, as part of formal marking, the work must be considered to have been assessed and, therefore, may not be further developed by the student for resubmission. The focus of teacher assistance should be on informing the student rather than on amending the draft.
This Policy should be read in conjunction with the following SACE Board documents:
- Supervision and Verification of Students’ Work Policy and Procedures
- Assessment Deadlines Policy
- Supervision, Verification, and Breach of Rules: Guidelines and Exemplars for Teachers
- Redrafting of Assessed Work Policy