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Universities should ensure their assessments are sound and defendable

18 August 2025 | Story André Damons | Photo André Damons

Universities have an obligation to ensure that their assessments are sound and defendable when they confer degrees for professional qualifications, such as in medicine. Can institutions confidently defend these results and what are the implications if they pass a student who is not competent?

These were some of the questions Prof Hanneke Brits, a family medicine specialist at the Free State Department of Health, as well as the Department of Family Medicine, at the University of the Free State (UFS), addressed during her inaugural lecture on Tuesday (12 August). The UFS, she concluded at the end of her lecture, titled To pass or not to pass: Can we confidently defend the outcome of our assessments? can defend its clinical assessments with the implementation of effective workplace-based assessment and trained examiners.

The implications of passing incompetent students

According to Prof Brits, who has supervised numerous undergraduate and postgraduate student research projects, she chose this topic because decisions have consequences. She gave an overview of the assessments in the clinical years of the undergraduate medical programme. In so doing, she also answered other questions including what may happen when universities pass students who are not competent and what may happen if they fail competent students. When the university passed a candidate, she said, that candidate may register with a professional body like the Health Professions Council of South Africa to work as a doctor.

“What are the implications if we fail to fail a student who is not competent? The implications are that patients may suffer if they are treated by an incompetent doctor, which may lead to the doctor running into trouble if it is found that their work is not up to standard. This may further lead the faculty being labelled as poor for training substandard doctors.

“The throughput rate of the university may go down and the university may not get subsidy for the students. The student must repeat his module with a lot of emotional and financial burden. They public may suffer because there are not enough healthcare professionals to treat them. Therefore, we must get this right,” she said.

When assessing students, assessors should start at the bottom: students should know, then they should know how, then they should show how and then they must do. All assessments should meet the basic requirements of validity, reliability, fairness, educational impact and feasibility, explains Prof Brits.

Workplace-based training and assessment

During her PhD study, she looked specifically at assessments in the clinical years of the undergraduate medical programme. “It is quite complicated,” said Prof Brits, “to do assessment for professional qualifications as you need to obey to the rules and regulations of the Department of Education, the Department of Health, the Health Professions Council of South Africa, the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa because they are our examining body, as well as our own university rules and international assessment guidelines and best practices.”

She compiled a framework to measure what they do at the UFS and found that the decision reliability was excellent – meaning the students that passed during the year passed at the end of the year and those that failed, failed. The reliability of some of the methods used for the final assessment was not good, however, if more assessments with supplementary exams were included, it was better.

The conclusion of her study was that the UFS mostly complied with the regulations of the regulatory bodies. The recommendation from this study was to implement workplace-based assessment (WBA) to improve both the validity and reliability of assessments and to make it more defendable. Prof Brits explained that WBA is where students get regular assessment and feedback while they work and receive training in hospitals or clinics. “For example, the student is seeing a patient in the emergency department who was stabbed with a knife on his hand. Is the student able to assess the severity, can the student manage the wound and what about follow-up?

“The advantage of WBA is that we train in real life situations and manage conditions that occur commonly. In real life situations, students use many senses while learning, e.g., seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, which all enhance knowledge retention. It is important that students receive feedback and that we document these encounters. To ensure a holistic approach to the management of patients we use Entrustable Professional Activities or EPAs – something that I can trust a person to do. It is a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes.”

News Archive

UFS boasts with most advanced chemical research apparatus in Africa

2005-11-23

Celebrating the inauguration of the NMR were from the left Prof Frederick Fourie (Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS), Dr Detlef Müller (Development Scientist and Manager: Africa and Asia of Bruker in Germany, the supplier of the NMR), Prof Jannie Swarts (head of the head of the Division Physical Chemistry at the UFS) and Prof Herman van Schalkwyk (Dean: Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the UFS). Photo: Lacea Loader

UFS boasts with most advanced chemical research apparatus in Africa

The University of the Free State’s (UFS) Department of Chemistry now boasts with some of the most advanced chemical research apparatus in Africa after the latest addition, a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer, was inaugurated today by the Rector and Vice-Chancellor, Prof Frederick Fourie. The NMR is used to analyse molecular structures.

Last month the Department of Chemistry celebrated the installation of the most advanced single crystal X-ray diffractometer in Africa. The diffractometer provides an indispensable technique to investigate among others the solid state of compounds for medicinal application.

“Three years ago the UFS executive management realised that, if we want to build a university of excellence, we should invest in research. We started to think strategically about chemistry and decided to bring the apparatus at the Department of Chemistry on a more competitive standard. Strategic partnerships were therefore secured with companies like Sasol,” said Prof Fourie during the inauguration ceremony.

“The installation of the NMR symbolises the ability of the UFS to turn academic areas around. I hope that this is the beginning of a decade of excellence for chemistry at the UFS,” said Prof Fourie.

”The catalogue value of the Bruker 600 MHz NMR is approximately R11 million. With such an advanced apparatus we are now able to train much more post-graduate students,“ said Prof Jannie Swarts, head of the Division Physical Chemistry at the UFS.

”The NMR is the flagship apparatus of the UFS Department of Chemistry that enables chemists to look at compounds more easily at a molecular level. Research in chemistry is critically dependent on NMR, which is a technique that can determine the composition of reactants and products in complicated chemical reactions, with direct application is most focus areas in chemistry,“ said Prof Swarts.

”Parts of the spectrometer consists of non-commercial items that were specifically designed for the UFS Department of Chemistry to allow the study of unique interactions in e.g. rhodium and platinum compounds,” said Prof Swarts.

According to Prof Swarts the NMR enables chemists to conduct investigations on the following:

To evaluate for example the complex behaviour of DNA in proteins as well as the analysis of illegal drugs sometimes used by athletes.
It provides an indispensable technique to investigate compounds for medicinal application for example in breast, prostate and related bone cancer identification and therapy, which are currently synthesised in the Department of Chemistry.
It can also be applied to the area of homogeneous catalysis where new and improved compounds for industrial application are synthesized and characterised, whereby Sasol and even the international petrochemical industry could benefit. This analytical capacity is highly rated, especially in the current climate of increased oil prices.
The NMR can detect and identify small concentrations of impurities in feed streams in the petrochemical industry, e.g. at Sasol and also the international petrochemical industry. These minute amounts of impurities can result in metal catalyst deactivation or decomposition and can cause million of rands worth in product losses.
It is indispensable for studying the complexity of samples that is non-crystalline. These materials represent the vast majority of chemical compounds such as solvents, gasoline, cooking oil, cleaning agents and colorants as examples.

According to Prof Swarts the general medical technique of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) in use at larger hospitals, is based on NMR technology.

”The NMR apparatus enabled the Department of Chemistry to characterise complex molecules that were synthesised for the multi-national company, FARMOFS-PAREXEL, and to negotiate research agreements with overseas universities,” said Prof Swarts.

Media release
Issued by: Lacea Loader
Media Representative
Tel: (051) 401-2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: loaderl.stg@mail.uovs.ac.za
22 November 2005

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