Outcome Based Assessment: Preparing Nurses to Future Employment

What is Outcome Based Assessment (OBA) and how does it prepare nurses for employment? The term OBA is the intentional collection of evidence of student learning based on outcomes. It yields a mark relative to the outcomes rather than other students. To simply put, OBA collects the results of the students using their output. 

Thorough planning: 

You need to clearly assess what is the classification of skills and information you will accept as relevant and important for successful performance by the students, then plan the assessments to measure it and the instruction to teach it.

Assessment throughout the course: 

You give more attention to the most recent evidence. You make an effort to give more feedback early, and give more chances. A positive way of understanding this is a driver’s test. You don’t average in the first time you practised with your final road test. Even if you fail your road test once, you get the score from your second attempt, not the average score from your first and second try, because the goal is to measure how competent you’ve become though the process, rather than get the average of all attempts.

Calculating grades: 

In an outcomes-based system, your group and weigh by the outcome, not by assessment task.  This means that outcome 1 might be 10% and outcome 2 could be 8% of the final grade. An individual test might have 50% of its marks in outcome 1 and another 50% in outcome 2.  In a syllabus, you’d explain your weighting by the outcome, not by how much the assignments and final are worth.

Education Training & Employment Australia (ETEA) is a leader on Registered Training Organisation (RTO), we pride ourselves not only in fostering academic excellence but also in making our students’ educational experiences fulfilling. The OBA Preparatory Program which ETEA offers for International Qualified Nurses (IQN) is a unique program designed to fully prepare overseas qualified nurses, who are required by the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) as part of the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Authority (AHPRA), to undertake an Outcome-Based Assessment ( OBA ) to apply for registration as a nurse in Australia.