The VET Resources / Drafting

Write the assessment first

It tells you what the content actually has to do.

Drafting content and then designing assessment for it produces material that covers the requirement broadly and prepares the learner for the task incidentally. Writing the assessment first inverts that: the content then exists to make the task achievable, which is a much sharper brief.

It also surfaces the volume problem early. An assessment requiring a substantial workplace project implies a quantity of preparation, practice and feedback that has to fit somewhere, and discovering that during content drafting is cheaper than discovering it in delivery.

The other benefit is coherence. When content and assessment are written in that order they cannot drift apart, which is the most common structural fault in materials assembled by more than one person.

It is worth writing the marking guidance at the same time as the task, since the act of specifying what a satisfactory response contains routinely reveals that the task is ambiguous.

Where the task cannot be written because the requirement is unclear, that is information about the requirement rather than about the writer, and it is worth resolving before drafting rather than papering over.

The other benefit of writing the assessment first is that it exposes duplication. Twelve units frequently require the same underlying performance in slightly different words, and a single well-designed task can address several, which reduces both the writing and the burden on the learner.