Graduate Qualities

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Assessment tasks and development of the graduate qualities

Overview

Assessment is the key to development of the graduate qualities. There are two aspects to this. First, assessment provides a significant incentive for students to engage in the learning experiences you have designed. Second, we can only give stakeholders the assurance that our graduates have actually achieved the graduate qualities  if we can point to evidence of their development. Assessment is the most obvious way of doing this.

The central issue here is that assessment must be planned across the whole program so that the type of assessment is matched to the graduate qualities identified in your program objectives.  

A course's responsibility to the program

To ensure that graduates from a program have the required graduate qualities to begin professional practice, programs at UniSA are planned such that opportunities to develop core graduate qualities are tied to specific courses. It is essential then that Course Co-ordinators are aware of the graduate qualities that may have been designated for their course. They are required to select assessment that will provide opportunities for students to develop and demonstrate those qualities as well as the body of knowledge associated with the course (see Selecting assessment to support development of graduate qualities for more information).

Across the whole program this quality must also be developed in assessment within a range of courses which incrementally build skills and increase professional competence (see Progression through a program for more information).

For example, a 2nd level course has been designated as one that contributes to the development of collaboration/team skills in a program (graduate quality 4). The assessment within that course must require students to apply their team skills explicitly and collect assessment evidence of that achievement. This occurs in addition to assessing the topic of the course. The development of this graduate quality is also mapped across the entire 3 year undergraduate program ensuring an adequate development of this quality. The figure on the right (click to expand) provides an indication of how this may look for graduate quality 4.

Assessment tasks

The Assessing students for graduate qualities tool (PDF 51KB) associates a number of the more common forms of assessment with their potential to assess particular graduate qualities. The list is not intended to be exhaustive but rather an indication of the kinds of assessment that might be used across the University. It can be used to identify courses in your program which have assessment tasks aligned with particular graduate qualities.

There are a number of points that need to be made in regard to the table and about the general development of graduate qualities within courses.

• The table is focused on methods of assessment suitable for graduate qualities 2, 3, 4 and 6. These are sometimes referred to as transferable skills or capabilities because they are the kinds of generic outcomes (regardless of field or discipline) that are seen as essential within the community.
   
• Because all assessment must occur within the context of a field or discipline, all assessment has the potential to assess graduate quality 1 to some degree. In any given assignment, however, you may choose to focus on other qualities and thereby allocate the weight of marks to these.
   
• Graduate quality 5 (ethics and social responsibility) and graduate quality 7 (international perspectives) are different in nature from the other qualities. They are concerned with engendering particular value positions that have their expression in a range of professional and community practices within specific social contexts. Their assessment is often best undertaken in conjunction with other qualities. They may be overtly linked to content (graduate quality 1) or process dimensions (graduate qualities 2, 3 4 and 6) and so their assessment will reflect the forms relevant to these qualities.
  
  For example, having an international perspective has implications for the knowledge base of a field or discipline (graduate quality 1); being able to access information through international agencies (graduate quality 2); understanding that creativity and problem solving may have cultural connotations (graduate quality 3); having the ability to work in cross-cultural contexts (graduate quality 4) and being able to communicate with those from other cultures (graduate quality 6). For the purposes of the table, reference to graduate qualities 5 and 7 have been omitted.

It is anticipated that programs will use a variety of assessment tasks and techniques to determine students' progress toward the graduate qualities. It also is anticipated that planning around the assessment of graduate qualities will employ a developmental approach in terms of the expectations for student capabilities in relation to the qualities from year level to year level. For example:

• at the first level of a program, assessment tasks might focus on students' foundational knowledge and skills
• at the second level, assessment might emphasize students' capacity to apply this knowledge and skills to a variety of 'real-life' tasks
• at the third level, assessment might focus on students' ability to relate their knowledge and skills to their future professional context

For more information on cognitive/developmental mapping systems that can assist in planning assessment tasks across the years of a program, see Progression through a program, Bloom's taxonomy and SOLO.

For further assistance in developing your program or course in relation to the graduate qualities, please contact the Academic Development team.

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