- Video Insight
Pre-Assessment Validation Explained: Ensuring Assessment Tools Are Fit for Purpose
- 1 min
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Kerri Buttery, CEO of VETNexus
Part of the data that we’re collecting, yes, we’re getting our completion from students. We’re getting feedback that we should be getting feedback along the way from students. But also our validation processes are core to that quality. And this is something that is so important and it’s very clear in our new standards. We need to be looking at this in more detail at all of our units of competency.
And what we find at the moment is a lot of RTOs don’t do pre-assessment validation or verification, as ASQA calls it on the website at the moment. They’ll just have an assessment piece. They’ll do a bit of a review, maybe a bit of a checklist, but they don’t properly go through a validation process before using that assessment.
And that’s critical, because if there are gaps in that assessment, if the instructions aren’t clear, if we’ve gone through some sort of process and identified those things, then we would have fixed them before they’re actually used by students. We need to have a thorough pre-assessment validation prior to using our tools, and then also afterwards.
Key Points
- Validation processes are core to training quality and are explicitly required under Australia's new VET standards.
- Quality data collection must include student completions, ongoing feedback, and robust validation — not just one of these alone.
- A common but insufficient practice is conducting only an informal review or checklist before deploying an assessment tool, which falls short of a genuine validation process.
- Without proper pre-assessment validation, gaps, unclear instructions, and compliance issues may only be discovered after students have already engaged with flawed assessment materials.
- A thorough validation process identifies and resolves problems before assessment tools are used by students, protecting both quality outcomes and audit results.