Centre Devised Assessment Guidance
Our approach to Centre Devised Assessment allows training providers to design and administer customised assessments tailored to the specific needs of their learners.
What is Centre Devised Assessment?
Many of our qualifications operate with an internally set and marked assessment strategy. This means that approved centres are allowed to design their own assessments for their learners.
Benefits of this approach include: the flexibility to tailor your assessment contexts to your learner demographic, control over when and how the assessments are updated, and a less formal assessment experience for learners.
As part of our external quality assurance processes, you may be asked to submit your Centre Devised Assessment (CDA) ahead of delivering an assessment for a qualification. This allows us to gain assurance that you are on the right track with designing your assessments, and reduces the possibility of your learners being asked to complete additional work when our EQAs come to review their assessments ahead of certification.
Whether you receive a request or not, we are always happy to review a CDA for you, just to give you that extra assurance!
Before you start
Make sure you have qualification approval! Contact our EQA team if you are not sure.
Have the qualification specification handy – you’ll need this to understand what the learning outcomes and assessment criteria are for the qualification. All our specs can be found on Verve or through our qualification search engine.
When creating centre devised assessment…
You must:
Display the full qualification title as referenced on the qualification specification.
Cover all assessment criteria in the mandatory and/or chosen optional units (where relevant) within the assessment.
Display the full unit reference number and title that assessments relate to. This is especially important where there are optional units within the qualification.
Map each question to the relevant assessment criterion from the specification. For example, if a question relates to AC 2.1 from Unit 3, you may include ‘(U3 2.1)’ next to the question.
Ensure documentation is easy to use for learners, assessors, IQAs and EQAs. This might mean that you dedicate certain areas of the CDA for exclusive use by these groups of people, allowing them space to record their answers, marks feedback, and signatures.
Please remember:
The command verbs in the ACs are really important. They tell you what a learner needs to do in order to meet the criteria. This, along with the level of the overall qualification or unit, will influence the type of question that you ask.
Competency command verbs (eg show, demonstrate) can only be assessed through observations, work products or expert witness testimonies (EWT). Where these are included in a CDA, you must include details of the arrangements for how you will collect and assess these.
You are allowed to combine more than one assessment criterion into one question, as long as they are both clearly referenced and the learner has the opportunity to fully meet all that are included. This approach can help to reduce assessment burden.
A variety of assessment methods can help to engage learners and aid thorough evaluation of their learning. You might consider including the following types of question: short answer, scenario based, multiple choice, extended answer.
The amount of space that you leave for a learner to complete their answer will set the expectation around length and depth of answer required. If you are asking someone to ‘explain’, make sure to leave enough space for them to do this.
Do a final proof before you submit. Poor spelling and grammar is one of the top areas of feedback that we give so take ten to hit ‘spell check’!
Learners will need to sign a declaration of authenticity to confirm that all of the work in the CDA is their own. You might want to incorporate this into the CDA itself for ease.
Multiple Choice Question Assessment Method
MCQs are often seen as an ‘easy’ option when it comes to designing and taking an assessment. In reality, they are much more complicated than they seem.
If you choose to include an MCQ exam in your CDA (as opposed to a handful of MCQ questions as part of a wider portfolio) there are some additional things that you will need to provide.
Your paper production process.
Entire assessment papers or question banks, fully mapped to the LOs and ACs of the qualification.
A copy of your review and rotation strategy which tells us how you will ensure:
Your assessment papers remain relevant and up to date
Learners do not become over familiar with question papers or individual questions
Confidentiality of assessments is maintained
Question banks and/or papers are stored securely and managed.
Details of your resit approach.
Your invigilation arrangements including conflict of interest, guidance and reporting documents.
Details of the assessment environment that you will mandate for learners.
Bear in mind that if the qualification is a pass/fail mastery model (the majority of ours are) then learners must demonstrate that they have met every assessment criteria. This means that if a learner fails a question relating to an AC where there are no other questions, evidence will need to be gathered from another source.
You might approach this by marking a learner’s MCQ and then asking them to complete portions of a portfolio that relate to the areas they have not passed. You should not ask learners to complete an entire portfolio as well as complete an MCQ as this would constitute over assessment and be burdensome.
