Welcome to the REAL Assessor Newsletter

What?
Careerforce Staff Assessors and Apprenticeship Advisors take every opportunity to support the development of each other’s assessment practice.

How?
We have been doing this by working together to review our trainee assessment submissions online. We call this “peer marking”.

Why?
This is enabling our assessment practice in many ways:

It ensures that we are making consistent decisions across the wide variety of trainee evidence that we see. Limiting the possibility of over or under assessing.
We are able to learn and share ideas about giving feedback and asking for more evidence in ways that engage and encourage the trainee whilst tapping into their knowledge.
We don’t have to struggle if we are uncertain about a trainee’s work and how to approach the assessment of it.
Talking to somebody else can support our understanding of the assessment task and widen our views on the types of evidence that might fit within it.
This supports us when we are assessing a unit/module for the first time and helps us become familiar and confident with it.

We are benefiting in other ways also:

Looking at assessments together forms strong connections with other assessors. This may lessen feelings of isolation when we know others are in the same situation and understand our “struggles”.
We may pick up on workplace and trainee issues and can provide feedback to the Careerforce Workplace or Apprenticeship Advisor e.g. gaps in learning that need to be supported within the workplace or on Aka Toi, plagiarism/copying issues.
We can provide joint feedback to the assessment developers about issues we see with the products. Those points where most trainees and assessors go off on a tangent!
We see more variety.

The message
Reach out for the support of another assessor. You are not alone and we all benefit from this kind of peer support whether we are struggling or would just like to “check-in”.

From the Careerforce team of assessors.

There are three phases to an assessment:

Preparing your trainee for assessment (briefing them about what is expected, checking that they understand the tasks and what they have to do, agreeing on a timeframe to complete etc).
Conduct the assessment (includes marking/assessing theory parts, completion of observations or verifications, other requirements).
Complete post-assessment processes (giving the trainee feedback, entering results, filing assessments securely).

When completing an assessment in Phase 3, assessors must:

Mark submitted assessments within two weeks of the trainee handing them in and give feedback within a week of completing assessment of their work.
Give feedback to the trainee before doing anything else.
After this, complete the assessment results page, i.e. sign-off and date the result.
Enter the results in iportal (if this is not an Aka Toi assessment) within 5 days of the date on the assessment results page (please see below).
Store securely every assessment from a one-year programme for 12 months, either hard copy or a scanned version (NZQA requirements). If the programme is greater than 12 months, assessments must be stored for 24 months (NZQA requirements).

Careerforce will no longer be submitting assessment results on behalf of assessors/employers. All results that are not submitted via Aka Toi should be submitted through iportal. If you do not have iportal access, please contact
assessor-admin@careerforce.org.nz to arrange access.

We would also like to remind you that when submitting results through iportal to please use the drop-downs to select the trainee. If the trainee does not appear on your drop-down, please contact assessor-admin@careerforce.org.nz and we will assist you. Please do not use the trainee’s NSN number to submit results as we are in the process of phasing out this method of submitting results.

Finally, we would like to remind you of our policy in regards to submission of results.

Assessment results are to be reported within five working days of the date of assessment. This will ensure that trainees are active and will not have their Training Agreements terminated due to inactivity. Failure to report results in a timely way is an infringement of trainees’ rights and it has a financial implication for some. This reporting requirement is audited by the Tertiary Education Commission and is one that we will discuss with individual assessors who are not meeting this requirement.

There have been instances where trainees put pressure on an assessor to have their assessments returned claiming that the assessments belong to them. This is not correct. Written assessments are tools by which an assessor gathers evidence about a trainee’s knowledge and understanding. Assessments should not be handed back to a trainee until after graduation or once all trainees in the workplace have completed a particular module/assessment. Assessors are required to keep a copy of every assessment for 12 months (or 24 months for programmes longer than 1 year). Additionally, as employment records, some organisations may require assessments to be retained on HR files.

Assessors should be vigilant about trainees who have shared their marked assessments with others in their workplace. Copying is not acceptable and sharing of completed assessments, including printing and sharing of on-line assessments is cheating and fraudulent practice. When an assessor identifies that this has occurred, they should notify Careerforce and escalate the matter to the workplace manager. Assessors should not pass any trainee who has cheated in this way and if results have been entered, Careerforce can have NZQA withdraw the results from the record of achievement.

Plagiarism (direct copying) has been identified as increasing. Careerforce is considering how to minimise this, including putting statements on learning resources and assessments and Aka Toi.
Careerforce does not allow direct copying from any source, such as Careerforce learning materials, books, printed material, the internet or another person, for answers to assessment questions.
Technical terms or definitions may be used as direct quotations, provided the source is referenced. This may also include work policies and procedures, legislation, or standards and codes.

What do assessors need to do?
Assessors (and observers and verifiers) should remind trainees not to copy. Trainees must use their own words for assessment answers.

Assessors should always use the assessor guide and should also be familiar with the learning material, and thus an answer copied from Careerforce material should be easily detected. Assessors must not mark plagiarised work as correct.

Seek more information from the trainee. This can be by having a conversation and noting down the key points of the discussion on the assessment. The assessor and trainee should both sign the notes to confirm that the notes are a correct record of a face-to-face discussion. Where an assessor holds a discussion by phone, just the assessor’s signature and date are sufficient.

Careerforce’s current policy is on our website at www.careerforce.org.nz/assessment-moderation/

Linda Blake
On behalf of the plagiarism working group

It is important that your trainees keep progressing through their training programmes. When they see those credits accumulating, it motivates them to keep going.

In order to motivate trainees, The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) requires a minimum of 10 credits be registered each calendar year that they are enrolled. This means that credits should be reported by 31 December.

Your organisation has made the investment in training, now ensure it’s having a return. Training is one key to employee success. Motivation and seeing results is another. If you get your staff going, it’ll have a positive impact on productivity in your organisation.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is our fervent belief in, and absolute commitment to workplace based training, and to improving the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders. We would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and applaud the critical role you have played over the last 25 years. The success we have achieved would quite simply not have happened without the dedication and commitment of our amazing nationwide network of assessors.

You may also be interested to know that back in 1994, Yahoo and Amazon also launched together with the PlayStation, Michael Jackson married Lisa-Marie Presley, we were introduced to Friends and Chandler Bing, and Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s President.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced the final decisions from the proposed reforms last month. These reforms will result in significant change to the vocational training landscape in New Zealand, but will be implemented very gradually. When announcing the changes, Minister Hipkins made it very clear that he remains absolutely committed to workplace-based training, and expects to see more of this happening.

The Reform of Vocational Education (RoVE) is intended to create a stronger, and more sustainable and unified vocational education system. Nonetheless, it represents a generational change in the approach towards vocational education, and we are continuing to work very closely with education officials as reform implementation plans are developed.

As we have previously outlined, industry training organisations such as ourselves currently perform two key functions:

The ‘arranging training’ function, which will be transitioned across to the new NZ Institute of Skills & Technology (NZIST) or other providers. The current timeframe for this transition is that it is not expected to be completed until 31 December 2022.
The ‘standard setting and skills leadership’ function, which will be transitioned across to new Workforce Development Councils (WDCs) with the expectation that these will be up and running by June 2021.

However, for now, everything remains business as usual. We will continue to keep you updated as the reform implementation plans are developed, but if you have any questions about these reforms in the meantime, please drop us a line.