Foundation Skills/The assessment cycle/The graduate profile and learning outcomes

The graduate profile and learning outcomes
A graduate profile is a list of attributes that a tertiary institution claims a graduate from a particular programme should have. The graduate profile normally appears early on in a curriculum document or a programme document. Collectively, all courses within a programme should contribute towards ther development of the attributes as listed in the graduate profile, although a particular course might only address some of these graduate attributes.

To read a sample graduate profile, participants enrolled in the Foundation Skills course through Otago Polytechnic can access the graduate profile for the Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Education on the course Moodle site.

As an exercise for a group of teachers in a programme, you could use a grid or table to map all the courses within a programme against a list of graduate attributes. In some cases (not always), such a summary could be included in a curriculum/programme document.

The broad learning outcomes for a course should be included in the module/course descriptor. All assessment tasks should align with these learning outcomes, in other words all assessment tasks should allow students to demonstrate their competence with- and achievement of the learning outcomes.

In most cases, the action verb used in a learning outcome indicates the cognitive level required of the student, e.g. if a learning outcome states that a student should "identify chemical hazards in an automotive workshop" then an assessment task that requires a student to "create a plan to minimize chemical hazards in an automotive workshop" is probably not a valid assessment task!