Blog
Posts for category: Product
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The 90% Problem: Why "Dip Sampling" Can No Longer Protect Your Provision
The 2025 apprenticeship assessment reforms have shifted responsibility for quality assurance decisively toward training providers. With the launch of Skills England and new flexibility in assessment delivery, providers are no longer just preparing learners - they are increasingly validating them.
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Designing Healthy RM Compare Sessions: Build Reliability In, Don’t Inspect It In
The best way to avoid the “we worked hard and reliability is low” moment is to design sessions so that health is baked in from the start. Healthy sessions are not accidents: they result from clear purpose, good task design, well‑briefed judges, and enough comparisons to let the model discover a shared scale of quality. This post turns what you now know about rank order, judge misfit and item misfit into concrete design principles you can apply before, during and after a session.
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Item Misfit: Listening to What the Work Is Telling You
If judge misfit shows where people see things differently, item misfit shows where the work itself is provoking disagreement. In an RM Compare report, item misfit does not mean “bad work” or “faulty items.” It means, very specifically, “here are the pieces of work that your judging pool did not see in the same way.” Those items are often where your assessment task, your construct, and your judges’ thinking come most sharply into focus.
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Judge Misfit: Making Sense of Agreement and Difference
When users first encounter the judge misfit graph in an RM Compare report, the immediate worry is often: “Have my judges done it wrong?” The term “misfit,” red threshold lines, and dots floating above them can feel like an accusation. This post reframes judge misfit as a structured way of seeing where judges are not sharing the same view of value as everyone else, and therefore where the richest professional conversations and the most important quality checks can happen.
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Reading the Rank Order: What Story Is Your Session Telling?
The rank order is the heart of an RM Compare report: it is the clearest expression of what your judges, working together, thought about the relative quality of the work. Understanding how to read it (beyond “who came first and last”) is the fastest way to move from staring at a graph to making confident decisions about your session’s health.
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Understanding RM Compare Reports: Building Assessment Health, Not Chasing a Magic Number
Most RM Compare users open a standard report, see a reliability value and a set of graphs, and then have to decide - often very quickly - whether their session “worked.” A single number is doing far too much heavy lifting in that moment. This first post reframes how to think about your reports. Instead of asking “Is my reliability high enough?”, the more useful question is “How healthy is this session, and what is it telling me to do next?”
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Reading RM Compare Reports: A Practical, 5 Part Blog Series
If you have ever opened an RM Compare standard report, seen a lot of graphs and a reliability number, and thought “Is this good? What do I do now?”, this series is for you. Many users invest time and energy in running sessions, only to feel deflated when reliability looks lower than they hoped or when misfit graphs appear to suggest something has gone wrong. The aim of this series is to turn those moments of frustration into confident, informed decisions about how to run and improve your sessions.
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Digital Equity and Mobile-First Assessment: Why RM Compare is Redesigning for Real Access
Assessment technology should work for every learner, not just those in affluent schools with modern devices and reliable broadband. Yet, as RM Compare moves toward a mobile-first user experience, new evidence reveals just how critical this shift is to educational equity. For millions of students in the UK and billions worldwide, smartphones are not merely one device choice, they are the only digital device available.
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Swiping Right on Assessment: Mobile-First Lessons for RM Compare
What can a dating app teach us about assessment? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The dramatic difference in decision time across platforms, highlighted in the chart below, is at the heart of RM Compare’s mobile-first transformation. It’s also a bridge—built by research—that connects traditional marking assumptions to the new realities of digital assessment.