Reconciling assessment quality standards and “double assessment” in competency‐based higher education

Abstract

Redundancy in assessment adds unnecessary time to degree completion, which also increases the cost of tuition. In addition, assessment practices that are overly burdensome for faculty can also place too much of a financial burden on an institution and, ultimately, the students. Therefore, competency-based education (CBE) institutions are wise to avoid redundancy in assessment whenever possible and to prioritize the scalability of assessments. However, there must be a balance in competency-based higher education between minimizing the cost of education and maintaining high-quality assessment practices that give employers confidence in the legitimacy of competency-based credentials. When literature resoundingly supports the use of multiple forms of assessment as a best practice, restricting assessment practices in CBE to only one form of assessment based on an ill-defined and unsubstantiated "double assessment" rule can have the opposite of its intended effect. It can reduce, not enhance, the quality of competency assessments and the validity of inferences about student learning derived from those assessments. This article discusses the problem with "double assessment" in CBE and focuses on two main forms of assessment, selected-response assessment and performance assessment, to compare their benefits and weaknesses. The article also provides an example of a complementary assessment strategy using multiple forms of assessment.