Assessment policy

This policy explains how the assessments on rTraining are built, how a paper is drawn, how it is marked, what you are told afterwards and what an employer is shown. It applies to every course that ends in an assessment. It is written from what the platform does, so where it describes a rule, the rule is enforced by the software or the database rather than by staff remembering it.

What an assessment is for

A certificate says that the person named on it showed, on the day, that they understood what the course teaches. The assessment is the evidence for that sentence. It is not a quiz to be got through, and every rule below exists because a certificate is only worth what the assessment behind it is worth.

The knowledge checks inside a section are different. They are there to help you learn: nothing in them is scored, stored or sent anywhere, and they play no part in your result.

How a course's assessment is designed

• Learning outcomes first. Each course version states its learning outcomes, and every question in its bank is written against one of them.
• A bank, not a fixed paper. Each course version has a bank of questions. Our authoring rule is a bank at least twice the size of what is drawn for each outcome, so that two attempts are not the same paper.
• A published blueprint. The blueprint says how many questions each paper has, how many are drawn from each learning outcome, and the pass mark. It belongs to the course version, so a later version can change it without changing what an earlier certificate was awarded against.
• One kind of question. Every question has four options and exactly one correct answer. Each question is tagged by what it tests: recalling a fact, applying it, or making a judgement.
• Critical questions. Some questions cover something that would be dangerous to get wrong. They are marked critical, and every paper includes one for each learning outcome that has them. A paper that could not include them is not served at all.
• Written and reviewed by named people. No question reaches the live bank until it has been reviewed, and no course version that carries an accreditation, or is applying for one, can be published without a named author and a separate, independent reviewer. A course with no accreditation may be credited to the rTriibe team instead. The conflicts of interest policy explains how that independence is checked.

Before you start

• You read the course first. A paper is drawn only once every section of the course has been opened and completed.
• You are told the rules. The pass mark, and any limit on attempts, are shown on the course page before you start and again on the assessment page.
• There is no time limit. No assessment on rTraining is timed. You can take as long as you need over each question.

Drawing a paper

• Each attempt draws its questions afresh from the live bank, following the blueprint. The order of the questions is shuffled, and so is the order of the options within each question.
• You have one paper open at a time for a course. If you leave part-way through and come back, you return to the same paper rather than getting a new one.
• A retake is a new draw from the start, so it will not be the same paper.

Answering and feedback

• When you answer a question, you are told straight away whether you were right, shown the correct answer, and given a short explanation that points back to the section that covers it. Because the answer is revealed, an answer cannot be changed once it is given.
• Questions can be read aloud. The reading is a recording of the question's own text, and the written question is always the version of record.

Marking

Marking is automatic and happens once, when you submit.

• The pass mark is a percentage set for each course version. The test is exact: your number of correct answers is compared with the pass mark without rounding, so a score just below the line does not become a pass.
• A critical question answered wrongly fails the attempt, even when the overall score clears the pass mark. So does a critical question left unanswered. Where that happens, your result says so and tells you which topic to go back to.
• No one can change a mark by hand. The columns that hold a score and a result cannot be written by any application account, and a learner cannot write to their own attempt at all. Starting, answering and submitting all go through the server, which checks first that the attempt is yours.

Your result

When you submit, you see your score, whether you passed, and every question you got wrong or left unanswered, with the correct answer, the explanation and a link to the section. Afterwards, your results page for the course lists the sections to read again before your next attempt, drawn from your latest paper, with the must-pass ones first. If you pass, your certificate is issued; see certificate verification for what it records.

If you pass but your access to the course has ended in the meantime, your pass is recorded and the certificate is not issued until access is restored.

Attempt limits and lockouts

Most courses allow unlimited attempts. A course may set either or both of these limits, and some courses allow one sitting only:

• Attempts before a pass: how many attempts you may fail before you pass, set somewhere from 1 to 99.
• Fails in twelve months: how many times you may fail in any rolling twelve months, set somewhere from 1 to 99.

Reaching a limit locks that course's assessment for the lockout period the course sets, between 1 and 60 months and twelve months unless the course says otherwise. The lockout ends at the start of a day, UK time. Limits count across every version of the same course.

• What counts is an attempt you submitted and did not pass. A pass is never counted against you, and it starts the count of attempts before a pass again. It does not clear the count of fails in twelve months, because that limit is about a pattern of failing. Fails that led to a lockout are not counted again once it ends. An attempt that was voided does not count.
• Cancelling. On a course with a limit, or with one sitting only, an attempt that already has answers in it cannot be cancelled, because cancelling would otherwise be a way round the limit.
• Lifting a lockout. Our staff can lift a lockout early, for example as a reasonable adjustment or where something went wrong at our end. They must give a reason, and the lift and the reason are recorded against your account and in our audit log.

The terms and the cancellation and refunds policy explain how a lockout affects what you have paid for.

What an employer is shown

If an organisation sponsored your training, it sees whether you passed, the date and your certificate. It never sees your answers, your score or your attempt history, including how many attempts you took, where you sat it from, or how long you spent on the course. The database refuses to return them to an organisation, whatever the organisation's role, and your certificate is read out to it without the score it carries.

What we keep

For every attempt we keep the paper you were given: the questions in the order you saw them, the order of their options, what you chose, whether it was right, and when you started and submitted. We also keep the network address your attempt was started from and handed in from, and the country, region and city our host estimates from each address. We keep them as evidence that the assessment was sat as it should have been, for an appeal or if a concern about malpractice is raised; they are kept exactly as long as the attempt, and your employer never sees them. An attempt is not deleted to put something right: where one has to be set aside, it is voided with a reason, so the record still shows that it happened. Attempts are deleted only if you ask for your account to be deleted rather than archived; see the terms.

We also keep how long each section of the course was on screen before you sat the paper: when you leave a section or press Next, your browser tells us how long its page was open in a visible tab, and we keep that in 15-second steps. It is not a measure of reading, nothing waits on it, and no result depends on it. It helps us look at an appeal, or a concern about how an assessment was sat, against how the course was actually used.

In the assessment itself we keep, for each question, when it first came up, when you answered it, and how many seconds it was on screen in a visible tab before you did, to the second and at most 30 minutes. No result depends on it, and you can see it in your data export.

We keep this because an appeal has to be checked against what actually happened, and because an accrediting body, where a course carries an accreditation, can ask us to show that our questions work. We do that with statistics about each question worked out from our own database, such as how often it is answered correctly. No assessment data is ever sent to an analytics service. A question that almost everybody gets right, or almost nobody does, is flagged for review once enough people have answered it, and can be withdrawn from the bank and rewritten.

How long attempts are kept is in the data retention schedule.

When something goes wrong

• A faulty question. If a question turns out to be wrong, we use the attempt records to find everybody it affected and put their results right, without waiting for them to notice.
• You think a decision is wrong. You can appeal; see the appeals policy.
• Something outside your control affected an attempt, or you need the assessment to work differently for you. See reasonable adjustments and special consideration.
• Someone did not sit the assessment honestly. See malpractice and maladministration.

Accreditation

Accreditation is not always CPD. Where a course carries an accreditation or award, the course page names the body, and the certificate records what the course carried on the day it was issued. An accrediting body's name or mark appears on a course page or a certificate only once that body has awarded the accreditation and while it is in date. Where that body sets its own requirements for assessment, they apply to that course as well as this policy and, where they are stricter, they apply instead. No course carries an accreditation today, because our application to the CPD Standards Board has not yet been decided.

Reviewing this policy

This policy is reviewed at least once a year and whenever the way assessments work changes. Next review: 29 September 2027.