You will be provided with a study plan in your learner’s guide. The subjects in the learners guide are in the order that you should follow; this should correlate with your study plan. The online learning centre subjects may be presented in a random order, so ensure that you follow the learner’s guide and study plan. Completing the subjects in this order will ensure that the materials you learn follow on from each other.

It is important that you follow this plan because you need to complete some of these written assessments prior to beginning your placement as a part of your insurance coverage process.

Some questions that you will complete will have a word count. The word counts are included to help keep you on track and avoid over or under answering the question. Your answers that have a word count, will be checked to see if the word count is met. If you are a little under or over the word count (i.e. 10%) then this will be fine.

Your assessments may be returned as ‘needs more detail’ or unmarked if the word counts are not met and you will be required to correct this in your reattempt.

Clinics will have differing protocols sometimes to what we teach. They are not necessarily wrong, but sometimes they may be outdated or do not have an evidence based background to why they are done that way.

We are not assessing the clinic, we are assessing YOU. Demonstrate your knowledge of both the clinic protocol and what you have been taught and why the difference is important. Even if you can't change things at your current clinic, in the future at another you may, or you may start working in a clinic that does things the way we have taught you and it'll be easier for you to adapt.

Example:

The patient was TPRed once, at lunch time, in accordance with clinic policy’

This doesn't show an understanding of what you have learnt in your subject.

Instead:

Our clinic policy is to only TPR patient’s once per day. Ideally it should be done at least twice per day as a patient’s status can change quickly. The TPR should assessed more often for ill geriatrics and critical care patients as their status can change rapidly, and they may even need hourly observations taken.

This shows both your understanding of your clinic's protocol and what you have learnt.

For ease of identification of assessments, it is very important that you use the right file naming convention AND that you ensure your name, assessment number and subject details appears in the header of your document.

An example of an acceptably named file would be as follows:

2.1 WHSV Submission SURNAME Firstname
1.1 ANRT Submission SURNAME Firstname

The first digit (1) represents the assessment number and the second digit (also 1) represents your attempt number. In this case this would be the first attempt for assessment 1.

The four-letter or four-letter code is the name of the subject you are studying (WHSV = Work Health and Safety; ANRT = Animal Handling & Restraint).

Many assessments do not require you to do additional research unless you are a Diploma student. Generally speaking, your Learner's Guide, online areas, textbooks and other resources we have pointed you to should have sufficient information to complete the assessment requirements. You should still reference these.

Some assessments will ask you to research, in which case you must do external research, which you should reference appropriately.

It is important to remember that we are assessing you on the materials that we teach. There are many different opinions in the veterinary industry, so in order to keep the teaching and assessing coherent we do only assess you on what we teach you.

Make sure when researching to use reliable sources, for example a website called lovemypet.org will most likely not have reliable information. Whereas a website called the Australian Association of Veterinary Nursing is more likely to have reliable information provided.

Refer to the Research, Referencing & Plagiarism Guide for full details on selecting reliable resources.

All your assessment work submitted must be your own work. That is, even if you get information from another source, it must be written in your own words to show your understanding. You cannot just copy in text from another source. Please refer to the Plagiarism Policy for information on this.

It is expected that you will reference all your sources utilised when writing your assessments. For many assessments, you may only use your textbooks and the learner’s guides, but for some you may wish to do external research.

At Diploma level, we do expect that you would have done additional research through peer reviewed journals and textbooks.

We ask that you use the Harvard Referencing System and include both in text citations and a reference list. We won’t penalise you if you get the formatting of your referencing not quite right, but we may refuse to mark an assessment if both in-text citations and your reference list is not included.

Refer to the Research, Referencing & Plagiarism Guide for full details on how to format your references.

We also have a Referencing Cheat Sheet that shows you how to format references commonly used by our students.

Your written assessments will automatically be checked by our plagiarism checking service Ouriginal (formally called Urkund). They will be checked against the internet, learner's guides and other student submissions - including from other training providers.

You may receive emails with the Ouriginal report, the initial plagiarism percentage may be listed as high (i.e. 30%) THIS IS NORMAL. The plagiarism detector will pick up on the assessment templates that you are provided with. The nurse educators will manually review every written assessment to look for plagiarism. In most cases, the reviewed plagiarism percentage is below 5% which is considered negligible.

As part of educating you as professionals, we feel that it is important that you use correct grammar and spelling within ALL your assignments.

Additionally part of the Government stipulated training package for all vocational qualifications requires us to assess your language, literacy and numeracy skills as adequate for the tasks the industry expects you to perform.

When in the workplace, using correct grammar and spelling is essential to provide a professional image. You may also be performing drug calculations, which if you get wrong, can have disastrous consequences for patients.

If an Educator finds an excess of spelling, grammar or typos in your assessments, they will be returned to you for resubmission prior to marking your assessment. Minor errors here and there won’t affect you – we are all human after all! You will never fail on spelling and grammar, however if we cannot understand what you are writing – we may not be able to pass you!

You can use grammar checking programs such as Grammarly if you are needing additional support with checking your spelling and grammar.