Attributes (characteristics)	Description
Demonstration of the use of evidence considered credible by society to document the quality of assessments	The various professional bodies (teaching institutions and professional orders) must be able to document with certainty—for society—the decisions made regarding the learners’ academic pathways and their level of competency for starting a professional career independently and competently. For example: A university is accountable to society for the decisions made based on the assessment of learners. “When students graduate from a university, the degree indicates to society that the graduates have a certain level of skill and expertise.”47
Validation embedded through the assessment process and score interpretation	When constructing an assessment program, elements which compose it must be chosen purposefully.5 We should carefully consider how validity can be ‘built-in’ to the assessment process during its the development.48 This consideration for validity throughout the assessment development process increases the credibility, defensibility and accuracy of the score interpretation.27 Ebel49 also argued that validity can be a ‘built-in’ feature of an assessment method. We take the view that all assessment at the three bottom layers of Miller’s pyramid can be controlled and optimized: materials can be scrutinized, stakeholders prepared, administration procedures standardized, psychometric procedures put in place, etc.48 Another element to be considered during the development of the assessment program is the consequences of the assessment process and subsequent score interpretation. The person responsible for the assessments must anticipate the potential consequences and implement measures or strategies to minimize them. The consequences measured should not be solely limited to the impacts of the construct, but rather all possible consequences. “(… ) the measurement or scoring procedure (e.g., irrelevant, unreliable, or omitted test items); the specific interpretation (e.g., an inappropriate pass/fail cut point); the attribute being measured (i.e., the wrong construct); or the response (e.g., the actions that follow the decision).” 34
Documented validity evidence supporting the interpretation of the combination of assessment findings	The interpretation of assessment scores must be done from the perspective of a “whole” (the assessment program in its entirety) that is greater than the sum of its parts. “The central key is that the programme of assessment is set up to allow the whole picture of a student’s competence to be obtained by a careful selection of assessment methods, formulation of rules and regulations and design of organizational systems.”4
Demonstration of a justified use of a variety of evidence (quantitative and qualitative) to document the quality of all assessment strategies.	Since traditional quantitative analysis (e.g., Cronbach’s alpha, psychometric analysis, etc.) are often lacking applicability for demonstrating the quality of a set of assessment strategies (i.e., assessment program), the combination of quantitative and qualitative evidences appears to be a solution to be considered. For qualitative assessments, the synthesis of individual pieces of qualitative data to form an insightful, accurate and defensible interpretation is analogous to quantitative generalization. Whereas we treat inter-rater variability as error for most numeric scores, in qualitative assessments we view observer variability as representing potentially valuable insights into performance (different perspectives). The method for selecting and synthesizing data from different sources (triangulation) and deciding when to stop (saturation) will inform the Generalization inference for qualitative data.50