ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Assessment, Testing and Applied Measurement
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1579124
Standardizing Course Assessment in Competency-Based Higher Education: An Experience Report
Provisionally accepted
- 1Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaiso, V Valparaíso Region, Chile
- 2Universidad de Valparaiso, Valparaíso, Valparaiso, Chile
- 3Facultad de Educación, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain
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We examine the implementation of Competency-Based Education (CBE) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (PUCV) in Chile, focusing on the challenges associated with assessment methods in measuring students' competencies accurately. To address these issues, we first introduce the Competency Assessment and Monitoring (C-A&M) model, which aims to standardize and improve course evaluation. Then, two complementary studies are reported: a withingroups design involving 20 Engineering courses and a between-groups design assessing the perceptions of 109 instructors across various faculties, including Law, Philosophy, and Education. Findings indicate that CBE is not yet fully realized at PUCV, with considerable room for improvement in evaluation strategies, alignment of learning objectives with competencies, and synchronization of training activities. However, the implementation of the C-A&M model led to significant enhancements in these areas, providing evidence of its effectiveness in advancing CBE practices.
Keywords: Competency-Based Course Assessment Standardization Competency-Based Education, Assessment model, Course structuring, Systematic evaluation, higher education
Received: 18 Feb 2025; Accepted: 26 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Vargas, Arredondo, Heradio and de la Torre Cubillo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ruben Heradio, Facultad de Educación, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain
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