Where the evidence actually lives

Retrievability is a separate problem from existence.

Providers commonly hold the evidence they need and cannot assemble it. Committee papers in one system, moderation records on a shared drive, feedback in a survey tool nobody administers, correspondence in individual mailboxes, and the person who knew where things were has left.

The test worth running once a year is a drill: pick a course and a past period, and try to assemble the full evidential picture as though it had been requested. The time it takes, and what cannot be found, is the finding.

The most common structural gap is email. Substantive decisions are made and recorded in correspondence that is neither retained systematically nor accessible to anybody but the sender, and it disappears when the person does.

Retention periods apply to these records and differ by jurisdiction and by record type, with some student and academic records carrying long obligations. Those should be established from the applicable requirements rather than from a general policy.

The corollary is that deletion also needs to be deliberate. Holding everything indefinitely is not a safe default where privacy obligations apply, and an organisation that has never decided its position has made one by inaction.

The other retrieval failure worth planning against is the departure of a single person. In most providers one individual knows where the evidence for a given course actually lives, and their resignation converts a retrievable record set into an archaeology problem. Documenting the locations, rather than the records, is a half-day of work.