The four main types of assessment are:

1. Faculty Assessments
2. Compass Assessments
3. Self-Assessments
4. Peer Assessments

This VSTAR Help Article will help you decide which one of the four main types of Assessments you should use.

Here is a decision map on when to use the 4 different types of assessment:

VSTAR Portfolio is the primary way in which Medical Students are assessed on the core competencies of Curriculum 2.0. In addition, students may fill out reflections of various kinds, and faculty may complete other types of assessments.  To determine what type of assessment to use, the first question to answer is who will be completing this assessment? Will it be faculty or students?

If the assessment will be performed by faculty, will they consist only of faculty at Vanderbilt?

• If the answer is YES, then the assessment will be a Faculty Assessment.
• If the answer is NO, then you may want to consider using a Compass Assessment.   Compass Assessments allow course coordinators or other administrative staff to setup and send out links that anyone can use to assess the student (or group of students). The links and their relationships have to be created manually for each invitation.

If the assessment will be performed by students, there is one main exception:  If the students will send feedback requests to faculty and or any external users by utilizing VSTAR Compass, then Compass Assessment must be used.  Using a Compass Assessment allows for students to request feedback for that assessment in Compass.  Otherwise, the question for Student Assessments is will they be assessing themselves or their peers?

• If the answer is self, then the assessment will be a Self Assessment.
• If the answer is peers, then the assessment will be a Peer Assessment. Here the default will always be anonymous, but you can uncheck that box if you want each assessed student to see which peer performed the assessment.