General standards are standards that apply to all assessments. Your students need to learn more than just the skill that is the main point of the lesson.
We have already seen some other standards that apply to all assessments:
Workplace requirements
The SNR and most endorsed and accredited units require competency at a workplace standard, even though standards vary from workplace to workplace. It assumes that your graduates must be employable, and employability can be used as a standard. This means two things:
Workplace health and safety
You are also entitled to require that students comply with WHS rules and you can ask about relevant WHS aspects of the task in an assessment. In fact, you are legally required to maintain a safe environment.
As part of an assessment, you may be able to get third party reports from the student's supervisor that the student complies with WHS procedures, or include WHS in your observations.
Legislation and regulatory requirements
Students should know the relevant laws with which they should comply. And if they do something illegal during an assessment, they must be assessed as not yet competent.
The SNR clearly says that an RTO must maintain compliance with legislation and any regulatory requirements. That is, compliance is required by the RTO whether or not the package says so. This compliance requirement extends to generic things like OHS, anti-discrimination, and consumer law. If the package doesn't explicitly say so, compliance with legislation and any regulatory requirements should be read into it.
The dimensions of competency usually apply to all work skills units, so you are usually required to reinforce them in your teaching and assess them. They only relate to the assessment of elements and are not de facto extra elements.
They don’t apply equally to all units. For example, they don't apply to knowledge-based studies such as basic literacy or university admissions courses.
Task skills
These are simply the ability to handle individual tasks. Can the student actually do the job? You can use this requirement to justify the little extra items that are part of doing the job.
It can be necessary to include efficiency here. That is, a student isn't competent if he/she can't perform the skill within a reasonable amount of time. For example, a new trainee nurse might do just as good a job washing a patient as a competent nurse, but take twice the time.
Manage contingencies
Do they know what to do if something goes wrong or not to plan? How do they handle interruptions?
Ask lots of "What if …?" questions. "You depend on person X to get their job done correctly. What if they made a mistake?" "What if this machine broke down? What would you do?"
"What potential problems normally occur in this situation? How would you respond to each one? What are the signs of it becoming a real problem, not just a potential problem? When would you try other ways of doing this?
Handle their job/role environment
Do they know how to relate to other people? How do they relate to their organization? If they have to do paperwork, do they keep it up to date?
Manage themselves and their tasks
Gather evidence on whether students can manage themselves and their tasks. For example, can they plan their own work, predict consequences, and identify improvements? Ask about getting people or equipment organized. Ask how their schedule works, and whether they keep paperwork under control.
There is generally no assessment policy written on the role of attitudes, and some authorities take the narrow view of assessing behavior only and consider attitudes irrelevant. However, many units contain requirements that are de facto attitude statements.
The rule of thumb is that attitudes must be appropriate to the kind of skill. The role of attitudes varies with the kind of job:
Besides, some attitudes (such as prejudice based on gender or race) can be unconscious but observable in behavior. Even when attitudes are unconscious, they still need to be appropriate to the student's work. Training should have raised those issues to a conscious level.
Confidence usually comes up as an issue.
Ideally, you'd like students to do a good job and be confident that they can do well. Consider these five variations:
Of course, if you're assessing someone who lacks confidence, it's an excellent idea to encourage them as much as you can.
What is "Competent"?
Several another de facto requirements are not written in policy but derive from the idea of competence. In essence, they mean that the student has all the skills they need to do their job relative to the unit requirements.
You should require consistency. The trend is that all evidence should consistently indicate competence, so it is clear the students can perform the skill consistently on more than one occasion. A patchy performance should not be considered competent.
The rationale is that a competent person has consistent performance. In fact, some standards now explicitly require consistency. Depending on how much evidence is sufficient, you may have to check that the student has performed the skill in a range of contexts over a period of time.
If you face inconsistent evidence, check to see what is going on. Here are two examples:
Most evidence for Jeff’s assessment appeared to demonstrate competence but some clearly demonstrated that the Jeff was not yet competent. (That is, there wasn't just a lack of positive evidence but also the presence of negative evidence.) The latter evidence was checked and found to be highly credible so a Not Yet Competent result was given.
Joanna’s case was much the same, with some evidence demonstrating competence and some evidence pointing definitely to a not yet competent result. The evidence was checked and one item was found to be unfairly biased against her. Joanna was assessed as competent.
The "principles of assessment" to refer to validity, reliability, flexibility, and fairness. Similarly, the "rules of evidence" are that evidence must be valid, sufficient, authentic, and current. The quality standards and all packages require them. Some are less complex and we can deal with them briefly before progressing to those that are more complex.
Reliable
The basic meaning of reliable is that the assessment works the same way every time. Reliability depends on assessors sharing a common interpretation of the units and of evidence being assessed.
It means consistent results:
Will the assessment give the same results at different times or for people who have learnt the skills in quite different ways? Will the evidence be interpreted in the same away by other assessors? Do different kinds of assessment of the same skill produce the same results?
Flexible
Will the procedure assess people in widely different situations?
Flexible means that the assessment works equally well for all students and situations for which it was designed. This includes disabled and RPL students where relevant. For compliance purposes, this should be evident in the tools.
Fair
Fair means that the assessment works equally well for all students for whom it is designed, including disabled and RPL students where relevant. Perhaps no single assessment strategy is equally fair for all students, although an assessment strategy can be fair for all members of a particular group.
Does the process favor one kind of student over another? How would you assess a disabled person? Do students know they can appeal? Do students know beforehand the way they will be assessed and criteria used in assessment?
Authentic
Is the work being examined the student's own work? Do you need to verify it? For example:
Current
Are you assessing skills that the student has now? Or what they once knew and have since perhaps forgotten? For example: A 10-year-old report confirming a student's computer literacy is not evidence of their current skills.
Some people also now use "current" to mean that you are assessing against the current version of the standards. While it is not too difficult to keep track of training packages, you will find that national training bodies also make minor revisions quite frequently and these are much more difficult to track.
Valid means that the assessment assesses what it is supposed to assess.
This has two meanings:
1. You are assessing the right thing. For example, an assessment of theory is not an assessment of practical competence, and (usually) vise versa. You can't assess skill in riding a bicycle through an essay.
If you tried, the student might not be able to ride a bicycle, even if he/she showed competence in expressing and handling concepts, and drawing and justifying conclusions.
2. You are complying with the standard. The assessment addresses all package requirements. In this meaning, assessments are invalid if they:
Does the assessment adequately cover the range of skills? Does it integrate theory and practice? Are there multiple ways to assess the learning?
Validity: the problem of "stretching"
It is possible to "interpret" an element statement by stretching it into something quite different, so that the assessment is no longer valid.
The student must be able to perform a skill in a specified context, but then we say that the student must also be able to adapt the skill to other contexts. However, some contexts are so different that it would be unfair to require the student to perform the skill in that way. In Kirsty’s case, the unit requirements have been stretched into very different contexts, so different that it would be unfair on her:
Kirsty, a female youth worker has all her training and experience with young, homeless girls in the inner city, and is a senior team leader. She is assessed as competent and commended for excellence.
Is it fair to say that Kirsty is not yet competent because she doesn’t work with boys of the same age? Or older boys? Or older upper class boys in an exclusive private school? What about older immigrant young people? No. Somewhere there is a line over which it becomes unfair to stretch.
You can ask too much. In your quest for excellence, you might make demands of students that are so high that the extra demands are unfair. In Justin’s case, the requirements were stretched upward.
The coordinator of Justin’s course was aiming for excellence. He determined that only the best would be able to get through.
He added substantially to the requirements and defined very high performance standards. The course was excellent and many students did the extra work to rise to the challenge, although nearly half the class dropped out. Those who finished were all assessed as competent and went on to do very well in other units.
Stretching upward doesn’t seem to happen as often, but it can be unfair to students like Justin:
On the other hand, you can stretch upwards as good practice. The units are simply minimum standards, and it is good practice to encourage students to achieve the highest standard that they can. It’s just that you can’t require students to do more than the actual unit to pass it.
In Aaron’s case, the requirements were stretched downward ("dumbed down"):
Aaron joins a VET course and puts in an honest effort. He finds it quite difficult, but is given extra help by a teacher who nurtures the students along so that they can at least fall over the line and pass the course. With all good intentions, the teacher stretched the elements lower than they should be.
You can ask too little. At this end of the scale, you may interpret the standards so low that you are basically cheating.
Whether the tendency is downward or upward, it seems to happen quite often.
Stretching can be handled by industry consultation to identify more precisely the standards for employability. Moderation is also important. In either case, the point is to specify fair interpretation.
So how do you know? Two ways. Check the AQF, which will help you decide the level. After that, it’s a consultation issue. Ask for opinions and make decisions based on the advice you get.
Adding to requirements
You are free to add requirements to the units, but if you add too much then the standard is substantially changed and the assessment is no longer valid. In other words, you can't fail a student if they get all actual unit requirements right and fail on the parts you added. A few colleges even treat the endorsed units as minimum standards, and add tougher expectations.
Then the question comes up, "Can you add other relevant standards in your assessment such as licensing standards and enterprise standards?"
The answer: If you're assessing for a recognized qualification or statement of attainment, you can only require compliance with other standards if the package allows it or the SNR requires it.
That means that you can include other relevant standards in the assessment in these ways.
It's the assessor's responsibility to have a procedure that asks students for enough evidence. But it's the student's responsibility to provide enough evidence.
There is no universal definition of 'sufficient evidence.' Newer packages make your job easier; they actually define it (e.g. "on three separate occasions"), so you only have to comply with that definition. (There is still a potential trap. Unfortunately, some training packages routinely specify in most units, "If a number is not specified then one is adequate," although a single shot might not really be enough.)
The normal best practice for most cases is as follows:
Simple solutions
But ...
There is no universal definition of ‘sufficient evidence.’ It will sometimes vary according to the actual competency, so you will need to find out how much evidence is sufficient on a case by case basis.
Consider the following ...