Auditing assessment practices in organisations: establishing quality criteria for appraising competencies

Assessment of competencies has become increasingly important in organisations as a tool to monitor as well as to improve performance. In this paper, we stress the need for careful scrutiny of assessment practices, which has led to an investigation of appropriate criteria for auditing the use of assessment tools. Assessment can have very important consequences for individuals as well as organisations, and the procedures and instruments for accomplishing the assessments require continual quality control. An exploration of quality criteria may help develop an appropriate audit instrument. As part of these investigations, an instrument for auditing was tried out at several institutions that had implemented assessment practices. The findings indicate the usefulness of an audit instrument for retrospective purposes to provide quality control. These findings also suggest such an instrument has value for prospective purposes and for improvement and further development of assessment practices.