AIRS-J/1 · Appeals

Appeal a decision. Your first appeal is free.

A candidate may appeal a certification-status decision, an access-support decision that affects access to assessment, or a suspension under AIRS-J/1, the Standard for Judgment in AI-Enabled Work. The first appeal is free. A person who was not involved in the original decision or delivery reviews it.

In force under AIRS-J/1 v2.3

How to appeal

  1. Write to AIR APAC within 30 days of the decision. Use the contact page and choose the topic "Appeal, complaint or access support". Say which decision you are appealing and which ground in section 18.6 applies.
  2. AIR APAC acknowledges your appeal in writing within 3 working days.
  3. The appeals reviewer reads the transcript, the published anchors, the access-support record if there is one, and the applicable procedures.
  4. You receive the outcome and the reasoning in writing within 15 working days of the acknowledgement. For a result released for a hiring decision the decision is given within ten working days (section 18.5). If the appeal is lodged within five working days of the release, the commissioning organisation holds any adverse communication resting on the result until the decision.

A member of the Review Board who had no part in the original decision or delivery reviews your appeal (section 17). AIR APAC names your reviewer in its acknowledgement. The owner of AIR APAC takes no part in deciding an appeal or a complaint. If you disagree with a level description itself, that is not an appeal. Send it as a comment on the Standard, and the Review Board considers it.

A complaint is a different route. See the complaints procedure.

The rules, as written

What the Standard says.

18.5 Appeal. A candidate may appeal a certification-status decision, any employment-grade result released to an employer (Sections 12.6, 12.8), an accommodation decision that affects access to assessment, or a suspension within 30 days. The grounds in Section 18.6 apply. An appeal on a result released for hiring is decided within ten working days. The applicant receives the result no later than the employer. Where the appeal is lodged within five working days of release, the commissioning organisation holds any adverse communication resting on the result until the decision (Section 12.11). The parties who received the result are sent the decision and, where it changed, the corrected result, which replaces the first for every recipient. Because rule-based scoring is deterministic, re-running the rule is not the review; the review looks for a wrongly applied rule or anchor, evidence the instrument extracted wrongly, a technical failure, or a procedural failure. A development reading decides nothing and is not appealable; a comment on it is a complaint under Section 18.7. Appeals are reviewed by the appeals reviewer under Section 17 who was not involved in the original decision or delivery. The review considers the transcript, published anchors, relevant access-support record and applicable procedures. Outcome and reasoning are provided in writing. Appeal is free for the first instance.

18.6 Grounds for appeal are: misapplication of an anchor; an observation not supported by transcript evidence; a procedural failure under Sections 4, 8, 9, 10, 11 or 15; denial or material misapplication of an access support; an undisclosed assessor conflict; a material technical failure; or a localisation or translation defect capable of changing the construct-relevant demand; the near-cut rule in Section 12.8.1 not applied; the sitting mode required by Section 9.1 not met. Disagreement with an anchor itself is not a ground for appeal; it is a comment on the Standard, and is routed to the review board.

Questions and worked examples.

Short pages that explain this part of the Standard in plain words. The Standard's own text, above and in AIRS-J/1 v2.3, governs.