Assessor roles and responsibilities

As an assessor, you have a huge number of roles and responsibilities, one of which is to ensure a methodical process within the assessment cycle. Let's look at other roles and responsibilities as an assessor. It's important to ensure that the assessment methods you use are fair and appropriate. When planning assessments to meet the needs of your learners, you must ensure that their experience is going to be meaningful and relevant. You achieve this by negotiating and agreeing on assessment plans with your learners, discussing types and methods of assessments and then set appropriate target dates. Also, supporting your learners with any special assessment requirements and dealing with any sensitive issues in a supportive manner. Once a decision has been made, appropriate feedback must be provided to the learner. Maintaining records of this will also satisfy organisational and regulatory requirements by providing an audit trail. The responsibility of providing constructive and developmental feedback to your learners is extremely important. We need to inspire and motivate our learners to get the best from them. Taking part in standardisation processes with other assessors is also very important as it will give our learners equal and fair access to all assessment opportunities. As an assessor, it's your responsibility to keep yourself updated and familiar with all acts, legislation and codes of practice and you must ensure that you continue to comply with them.

Professional competence and taking an active part in your professional development must be continued. Other roles and responsibilities that you have as an assessor will include identifying and dealing with any barriers to fair assessment for the learner, implementing internal and external verifier action points, making judgements based on assessment criteria and finally making the best use of assessment types and methods. To give quality of service to our learners, it's extremely important to have a starting point when planning and to manage assessments. This is achieved by studying and ensuring that you fully understand the programme syllabus or the qualification handbook. This will state how the subject is to be assessed and quality assured and how the results should be recorded. Using this information, you will be able to ascertain whether you need to produce any assessment materials yourself. You will also be able to find out if any other requirements may need to be followed in the organisation's assessment policy or other regulations relevant to the subjects that you will be assessing.