Documentation / QueryTek Review glossary / Adjudication
Adjudication is the defined path for resolving a review disagreement or a case the criteria do not cleanly decide. A named authority makes the call and records the reasoning alongside it, so the resolution becomes part of the review evidence rather than a decision someone remembers making informally.
Qualified reviewers applying the same rubric will still disagree on genuinely borderline material. That is not a defect in the rubric or the reviewers; it is what a boundary case looks like. Adjudication is what a program does about it.
Three properties make it work.
Authority is named in advance. Whoever adjudicates is identified before the disagreement occurs, by role. A dispute that escalates to whoever is available produces inconsistent outcomes and no clear accountability for them.
Reasoning is recorded, not just the verdict. The value of an adjudication is largely in the reasoning, because the next similar case should be decided the same way. A resolution recorded as a bare outcome cannot inform anything.
Resolutions feed back. Repeated adjudication on the same kind of case is evidence that the rubric is ambiguous. A program that treats adjudications as one-off decisions keeps re-litigating the same question; one that treats them as signal clarifies the rubric and the escalations subside.
Adjudication also covers the incorrect restrictive outcome — the review equivalent of a false positive, where material was flagged or restricted and should not have been. Handling that through the same recorded path is what keeps the correction visible rather than becoming an informal override.
The rate matters as a diagnostic. Very few escalations may mean reviewers are resolving disagreements quietly rather than that the rubric is clear; very many suggest the criteria do not discriminate well on real material.
Every review program encounters cases its criteria do not cleanly decide. The difference between programs is whether those cases are resolved by a named authority on the record or by whoever pushes hardest, off it.
Adjudication records are also what make consistency claims credible over time. Without them, a program can assert that similar cases are treated alike but cannot show it.
QueryTek Review routes disagreements and unclear cases to a defined adjudication path and records the resolution with its reasoning as part of the review evidence. Escalation thresholds and reviewer hierarchies are set per engagement.
