When designing assessment tools, there is the need to guide respondents to the type and quantity of evidence required so the assessor can make their judgement on performance.
When it comes to knowledge evidence requirements in a unit of competency, sometimes we see word counts included. Here's why including word counts is a useless endeavour and should be ceased:
1) Word counts are unfair
What if the student needs more than the arbitrary allocation to express their response? Does this mean their knowledge is unsatisfactory?
What if the student can answer more succinctly than the the allocated 'limit' and fails to meet the bottom threshold? Is their knowledge unsatisfactory?
2) Word counts are irrelevant
Unless the unit of competency specifically asks for the skill of providing a response within set parameters, how well a student can provide an answer using only x to y number of words is irrelevant. (In all our years of pre-use validation and the 1000s of documents reviewed, we've never come across a unit that requires this - please let us know if you know of one). VET assessment should only seek evidence of the knowledge and skill requirements contained in the unit of competency; nothing more, nothing less
3) Word counts are not indicators of sufficiency
Sufficiency of evidence refers to the quality, quantity and relevance of all evidence presented in a claim for competency. It does not implicate that longer answers (or answers with specific word counts) have any direct relationship to competency requirements (unless of course, there was ever a unit to specifically require this. Which to our knowledge, there is not)
4) Word counts are impractical
Word counts assume the response to questioning will be written. Without getting into the debate about whether KE should be assessed via written means or not (noting some students appreciate the time to craft a response to a contextualised question and reflect on it in a way verbal responses do not allow; and noting verbal answers immediately confirm authenticity from the person speaking), a word count means the assessor must confirm the response falls into the stated parameters. What if reasonable adjustment has been applied and the student is responding verbally? Does the assessor need to count out what was spoken?? Impractical!
5) Word counts can be embarrassing
When an assessment instrument states a word count, a couple of things happen. Firstly, the word count becomes part of the stipulation for satisfactory performance according to the question/task as written. Secondly, that then means the provided benchmark must adhere to those parameters. Because after all, the benchmark in the assessor guide is what all assessors must use to maintain reliability of assessment judgements.
Word counts become embarrassing when the benchmark response - the level of performance to be considered acceptable by all assessors - exceeds and/or does not meet the word count. If the assessment tool answer guide cannot meet the word count, why is that expectation set for students?
We don't mark students 'not yet satisfactory' if their responses contain spelling or grammatical errors (unless the unit requires correct spelling, punctuation and grammar - and yes, there are some units that require this) - why would we consider our assessment judgment needs to be influenced by a word count?
So what's the alternative?
Word counts in VET assessment tools are likely introduced for the purpose of adding guardrails - to keep students on track and focused, and to save assessors time from having to mark unnecessarily long submissions.
There are other ways to achieve these outcomes besides imposing word limits. And it comes down to expertise in assessment tool design and also the way things are worded. Examples of other, better ways to indicate the type of response required/acceptable include:
In a short paragraph, briefly explain xyz
Use brief dot points to correctly identify abc
Outline the key points about why xyz must be implemented at abc time
Use short statements to correctly explain necessary workplace application of xyz
In summary
Although common in higher education (i.e. university study) word counts should not be part of the VET assessment environment. This article has given five (5) valid reasons for their immediate removal from VET assessment tool design.