The need for improving assessment system in maritime education and training

STCW is a fine example of communication failed to go beyond its creators’ community boundaries. After hearing from the shipping industry about shortcomings of the STCW79 and the fact that it has failed to achieve its objectives, international maritime community virtually created a new convention. Compare to its predecessor, STCW95 based on a contrastive philosophy. The 1995 Convention adopted Competency Based Training (CBT), as a new maritime pedagogical practice. After a decade of its implementation answer to the question of what has fundamentally changed since then was hard to answer. Changes that realized by STCW95 for many training institute did not exceed curriculum modification of already existed ones, whereas, STCW95 aimed to produce a change in concept and worldview of maritime education and training. The case is worse with maritime administrations and competency certification authorities in many countries. The bureaucratic nature of these regulatory organizations prevents many of them from effecting basic change required by the convention. One of the main indicators of this reality is the assessment system. Currently, the final evaluation of competency still heavily relied on written and oral examinations, albeit simulators, in some countries, are small part of their assessment systems. The last revision of STCW Convention in 2010 seems to overlook this problem and it did not affect how the competency of mariners evaluated. This paper discusses how the assessment for certification in practice today not only does not measure the authentic competency of the mariners but also how it shaped the pedagogical practices of the maritime training institutes. The paper recommends Quasi-community as a novel framework for teaching and assessment in maritime domain (Emad and Roth, 2016). This method allows the student seafarer not just learn how to be successful in the examinations but how to be authentically competent and perform better on the job.