Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items

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 welcomes Prof Francis Petersen as new Vice-Chancellor and Rector

2017-04-02

Prof Francis Petersen takes up office as the 14th Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the University of the Free State today.

“On behalf of the UFS Council and the university community, I would like to welcome Prof Petersen to the university. He brings to the UFS a distinguished academic record, confident leadership, innovative thinking, and an understanding of the extent of the challenges being experienced by universities in the broader South African context,” says Mr Willem Louw, Chairperson of the UFS Council.

“I am excited to join the UFS and look forward to meeting the university community, to get to know the three campuses, and to engage with staff and students. In a way, it was a natural progression for me to be appointed in this position, having been Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and then Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Institutional Innovation at the same university. On the other hand, I believe that universities in South Africa need strong and innovative leadership. I would like to make a contribution to the higher-education system in this regard. Moreover, I regard the UFS as a very good university, and see my challenge in taking the UFS to the next level,” says Prof Petersen.

“Challenges and making a difference motivate me – whether complex or simplistic, the opportunity to be able to provide solutions and taking people with me while developing these solutions, is what ultimately motivates me.”

“It is important that different viewpoints are respected. The UFS must be a place where everyone feels welcome. There must be a strong sense of belonging; staff and students must feel they are making a contribution to the university,” he says.

According to Prof Petersen, the major challenge for the university is its institutional climate. “My focus would be to strive towards creating an institutional climate of inclusivity, respect for one another, valuing diversity in all its forms, and to make the university a welcoming place. The UFS is in the process of developing an Integrated Transformation Plan (ITP) that will serve as the road map to address the institutional climate challenge, but will also assist (if implemented effectively) in excelling the UFS in areas of teaching and learning, research and innovation, and community engagement through scholarship,” says Prof Petersen.

“I am a good listener, I am outcome-based, and my vision for the university includes diversity, inclusivity, and academic excellence,” he says.

Prof Petersen was born in Oudtshoorn and grew up in Malmesbury in the Western Cape, where he also matriculated. He graduated from Stellenbosch University with a BEng (Chem Eng), MEng (Metal Eng), and PhD (Eng) degrees and completed a short course on Financial Skills for Executive Management. He is a recipient of the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Award for research excellence, and was visiting professor at the Cape Technikon and extraordinary professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stellenbosch University. He is a regular reviewer of journals, and member of a range of editorial boards for international journals. He is also a registered professional engineer with the Engineering Council of South Africa and a Fellow of both the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, and the South African Academy of Engineers.

He brings to the position of Vice-Chancellor and Rector his extensive experience of management in both the industry and academic sectors. He has been the executive head of strategy at Anglo American Platinum and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Cape Technikon (now Cape Peninsula University of Technology). Among others, he previously served as member on the Board of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the National Advisory Council on Innovation, and the Council of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

Prof Petersen is married and has two sons. He was appointed by the UFS Council at the end of 2016 after Prof Jonathan Jansen stepped down as Vice-Chancellor and Rector on 31 August 2016, serving in this position since July 2009. Prof Nicky Morgan, Vice-Rector: Operations at the UFS, has been acting Vice-Chancellor and Rector since 1 September 2016.

Released by:
Lacea Loader (Director: Communication and Brand Management)
Telephone: +27 51 401 2584 | +27 83 645 2454
Email: news@ufs.ac.za | loaderl@ufs.ac.za
Fax: +27 51 444 6393

Back

Economic and Management Sciences

Education

Health Sciences

The Humanities

Law

Natural and Agricultural Sciences

Theology and Religion

Open Distance Learning

Business School

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept