Moderation records are the ones most often missing

And the ones most directly about academic standards.

Moderation, meaning the process by which a provider satisfies itself that assessment judgements are consistent and at the right standard, is central to any assessment of academic quality and is the area where evidence is thinnest.

The usual state is that moderation happens, in the form of experienced staff discussing borderline work, and leaves no record. A conversation that resolved a genuine question is indistinguishable afterwards from no conversation at all.

A record does not need to be elaborate. Which unit, which samples, who was involved, what was found and what changed. Five lines per moderation event, filed consistently, is a complete evidential answer.

The element most worth capturing is disagreement, since a moderation record showing that two markers differed and how it was resolved demonstrates the process working. Records showing unanimous agreement every time invite the question of whether anything was actually examined.

Where external moderation or benchmarking against another provider is used, keeping the correspondence and the comparison is worth more than the summary, because it evidences that a genuinely external view was obtained.

It is worth adding that moderation of the highest and lowest results carries disproportionate weight. Borderline decisions are where standards are actually set, and a moderation sample drawn from the middle of the distribution examines the cases where the judgement was easy.