Diploma of Counselling – CHC51015

Diploma of Counselling – CHC51015, CRICOS Code: 0100495

The Diploma of Counselling course is designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge required to undertake generic counselling work using established counselling modalities. They learn communication, micro-counselling and interviewing skills and draw on varied counselling therapies to assist clients.

The Diploma course can be completed in 2 years studied full-time. Part-time study options are available. Each subject takes 80 hrs on average to complete. Students need to spend around 17 hours in studying a week. To complete the Diploma of counselling, 17 units of competency are required including 13 core units and 4 elective units. (see course structure part below for the specific descriptions)

The training and assessment are delivered online or mixture of different modes for local or oversea students. However, international program in Australia is delivered in a mixture mode (face to face mostly and little bit of online)

Each unit was designed for accredited training in counselling with vocational outcomes. It will train students to achieve learning outcomes and units of competency through proper training and assessment process and tools.
Each assessment method is designed to cover units of competency.
Students who successfully completed all the requirements of each training stage graduate the diploma course which means they obtain the result of “Competent” in all subjects.
Final Academic Transcripts will show results as either

C Competent
NYC Not Yet Competent.

When students are satisfactory in all assessments, they receive the result of “Competent”
When they are not satisfactory in an assessment aspect, they will receive “Not Yet Competent” A student whose result for an assessment item is “Not Yet Competent” will have a second chance to resubmit the assignment. If the result of the second submitted assignment is still not satisfactory, the student will be required to pay a penalty and may resubmit their assignment as their last chance. If the student does not pass the subject and wish to continue studies, they will be required to re-enrol into that subject an will be charged in full for those units.

ACC follows principles of assessment and rules of evidence in assessment process in line with the standards of NVR RTO
Principles of assessment are required to ensure quality outcomes. Assessments should be fair, flexible, valid and reliable as follows:

1. Fairness: Fairness requires consideration of the individual candidate’s needs and characteristics, and any reasonable adjustments that need to be applied to take account of them. It requires clear communication between the assessor and the candidate to ensure that the candidate is fully informed about, understands, and is able to participate in, the assessment process, and agrees that the process is appropriate. It also includes an opportunity for the person being assessed to challenge the result of the assessment and to be reassessed if necessary.
2. Flexible: To be flexible, assessment should reflect the candidate’s needs; provide for recognition of competencies no matter how, where or when they have been acquired; draw on a range of methods appropriate to the context, competency and the candidate; and, support continuous competency development.
3. Validity: There are five major types of validity: face, content, criterion (i.e. predictive and concurrent), construct and consequential. In general, validity is concerned with the appropriateness of the inferences, use and consequences that result from the assessment. In simple terms, it is concerned with the extent to which an assessment decision about a candidate (e.g. competent/not yet competent, a grade and/or a mark), based on the evidence of performance by the candidate, is justified. It requires determining conditions that weaken the truthfulness of the decision, exploring alternative explanations for good or poor performance, and feeding them back into the assessment process to reduce errors when making inferences about competence.
   Unlike reliability, validity is not simply a property of the assessment tool. As such, an assessment tool designed for a particular purpose and target group may not necessarily lead to valid interpretations of performance and assessment decisions if the tool was used for a different purpose and/or target group
4. Reliability: There are five types of reliability: internal consistency; parallel forms; split-half; inter-rater; and, intra-rater. In general, reliability is an estimate of how accurate or precise the task is as a measurement instrument. Reliability is concerned with how much error is included in the evidence.

Rules of Evidence are closely related to the principles of assessment and provide guidance on the collection of evidence to ensure that it is valid, sufficient, authentic and current as follows:

1. Validity: see Principles of Assessment.
2. Sufficiency: Sufficiency relates to the quality and quantity of evidence assessed. It requires collection of enough appropriate evidence to ensure that all aspects of competency have been satisfied and that competency can be demonstrated repeatedly. Supplementary sources of evidence may be necessary. The specific evidence requirements of each unit of competency provide advice on sufficiency.
3. Authenticity: To accept evidence as authentic, an assessor must be assured that the evidence presented for assessment is the candidate’s own work.
4. Currency: Currency relates to the age of the evidence presented by candidates to demonstrate that they are still competent. Competency requires demonstration of current performance, so the evidence must be from either the present or the very recent past.

The following course-specific competencies are achieved through the completion of the Diploma of Counselling.