An Automated Entrustment Professional Activities Tracking System (EPA-TRAC) That Holistically Capture Competence: A Paradigm Shift to Programmatic Assessment

Competence is a complex phenomenon that requires comprehensive and holistic assessment. This could be only be achieved through a complete assessment program that navigates poles between assessment for learning, assessment of learning and assessment as learning. Assessment of competence is not an easy task; educationists resorted to unfolding competence into sub-sub-competences and assessing them as separate chunks which violated the purpose of competency-based education. This is attributed to the reduction of the rich information from an assessment to a numerical score. In addition, evaluations of chunks from different competency domains are collated together in a compensatory manner rather than in a conjunctive manner resulting in adding oranges to apples with resultant meaningless assessment information. A useful contribution to this whole issue is the introduction of entrustable professional activities (EPAs) which are considered portal for capturing and visualizing competences in a holistic manner. EPAs provide a better language to make education more task-based. This necessitated a different assessment paradigm "Programmatic Assessment". This assessment paradigm ensures convergence of assessment data points that keep competence integrated into a whole meaningful picture. In this type of assessment model, the trainee has role in gathering, collating and reflecting on the various assessments in an informative way that triangulates evidence and translates them into learning goals. Hence longitudinal, information-rich feedback and reflection are crucial in such assessment system and could be collated in a developmental portfolio. In such model a variety of assessment tools could be used so long as they constitute a high utility index; assessment could be psychometric and workplace-based. Whether scores from psychometric assessments or enaction of feedback and learning goals are used for making judgment, remains the decision of the curriculum and assessment system designers according to context and purpose of assessment. Being complex to realize, an automated system (EPA-TRAC) is developed to capture that assessment system.