The delicate dance: The assessment implications of awarding students vocational qualifications within university degrees.

This paper explores the implications for assessment of embedding qualifications from the vocational education and training (VET) sector within university qualifications. As VET qualifications are now all competency based, assessment in the two sectors is quite different, since universities have generally eschewed competency-based training and assessment. A general discussion of the issues is followed by the results of a small-scale research study carried out in the VET discipline area itself, with participants drawn from the AVTEC list of VET teacher-educators. Telephone interviews were conducted with nine Australian university academics involved with such qualifications; and data were extracted from a broader study of students who had undertaken the Certificate IV in Assessment and Workplace Training embedded within degrees and graduate diplomas in VET at one of these universities. It is clear that there are many assessment challenges involved with the practice of embedding, which have not yet been systematically addressed.