Quality assurance procedures in the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA)

My team of assessors in the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement

A key part of an internal quality assurer’s role is to ensure that the experience or the assessment process meets the required levels and that the whole teaching and assessing team are consistent in their work. My team of assessors for the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA) interpret the qualification in the exact same way. First as an IQA, we need to determine which areas need improvement and we can only do this by sampling learners work, assessment decisions and training practice. Standardisation is about ensuring fairness, reliability between all staff who are involved with learners.

Standardisation in the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement

Standardisation should take place over sessions and should also be a dedicated event. Simply having an operations meeting to briefly cover a learning outcome is simply not going to cut it. It is not recommended that you cover a full qualification in one sitting, but you may want to look at covering the whole qualification over a year. For example, we carry out standardisation meetings for the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA) every month but over the course of the year, we will cover all of the learning outcomes.  

IQAs in the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement

As an IQA, its not me dictating would all of the assessors need to do, but to discuss with assessors their own experiences and work together to come up with ways of interpreting the qualifications and to ensure that consistency and quality is upheld. It might even be a case that following a standardisation meeting, that you decide to change assessment decisions or create new training materials. When I created the materials for the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA) it was done over time recognising trends where learners were struggling and then discussing with my team, how we can improve and then setting action plans to do it.  

The IQA process can also include issuing questionnaires or surveys to learners and assessors to obtain feedback. The results of these should always be circulated and any action points followed up. If IQA does not take place, there are risks to the accuracy, consistency and fairness of assessment practice. This could lead to incorrect decisions and ultimately disadvantage the learners. Assessment systems should be monitored and evaluated continuously to identify any actions for improvement, which should then be implemented.  

Working across many roles in different settings such as schools, colleges, universities and for awarding bodies, standardisation activities include meeting with other trainers or assessors to re-assess work and discuss decisions This is extremely helpful for newly qualified or inexperienced staff. We will compare how assessment documentation has been completed by assessors and look for ways to find a happy medium. We will look at how we interpret the qualification or programme requirements, and we can validate this with the awarding body. We would look to devise our revise assessment documents.

For the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA) we changed the working in some of the questions to give specific examples in answers. For example, in some questions, learners were not producing a sufficient number of examples in their examples, so we changed the wording which has helped our learners to produce better answers which has increased the first-time pass rate.