There is a simple rule at the heart of practical assessment: if you’re assessing a skill, you have to see the student do it. 

Knowledge assessment and skill assessment are not interchangeable. If we are assessing knowledge, the student must tell us something. If we are assessing a skill, we have to watch them perform it — or examine the product they have created, whether that is the dish they cooked, the report they wrote, or the thing they built. A student explaining how they would do something is not evidence that they can do it. Questioning can give you evidence of knowledge, but questioning on its own can almost never give you evidence of skill that meets the Rules of Evidence. 

Around 1 in 6 Australians lives with disability. According to the most recent ABS Stats, that figure has actually climbed to more than 1 in 5 – 21.4% of the population, or 5.5 million people. Whichever way you frame it, the message for Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) is the same: the chances are high that there is a learner in your cohort right now who has a disability of some kind. 

Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) are increasingly relying on AI-generated quizzes uploaded to a Learning Management System (LMS) – a quick AI prompt, a neatly generated quiz, and up it goes, job done. Except…it isn’t.  

While AI-generated assessments can be comprehensive and substantively sound, simply uploading them to an LMS without thoughtful adaptation often results in poorly designed, generally non-compliant assessment tools. 

Let’s be honest. AI is no longer some future-focused concept sitting off to the side waiting for us to catch up. It is already built into the tools people use every day to write, search, plan, create, communicate and solve problems. That is exactly why DigComp 3.0 matters for our vocational education and training (VET) sector.

One of the biggest shifts in the updated framework is that AI has been added and embedded across digital competence quite broadly. For RTOs, that matters because there is a clear framework about what digital competence is. It is about whether learners can participate effectively, safely and critically in increasingly digital learning and work environments.

Since publishing the article Pre-use Assessment Review and the 2025 Standards for RTOs, we’ve had a steady stream of practical questions from RTOs trying to implement Standard 1.3 in the real world with limited time, mixed-quality resources, and constant pressure to just get it delivered.

This follow-up answers some of the most common questions we receive.

There has been much discussion around the requirements associated with “pre-assessment validation” of assessment tools, or “pre-use review” of assessment tools, or other terms that have been used interchangeably to refer to a process that Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) need to be implementing. This article focuses on the pre-use review (Standard 1.3) rather than the validation requirements of Standard 1.5.

The AQF (Australian Qualifications Framework) review in 2019 signalled a new era for a holistic training system in Australia.