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Intercultural competence and assessment: perspectives from the INCA Project 483

own. Such questionnaires mainly focus on the subject’s own assessment of his
or her competence, and therefore run the risk of producing socially desirable
answers. Also, a problem with the self-assessment scales commonly used with
such questionnaires is their inability to assess behaviour itself. In addition to a
biographical questionnaire, the INCA team therefore also chose to include be-
haviour-oriented test types in the final suite.
Moreover, the way one sees oneself is not always the same as the way one is
seen by others. So in order to have a balanced and more objective view of a per-
son’s competence, the INCA team felt it necessary to complement the self-
evaluation with assessment tests based on external assessors’ evaluations. An
assessment centre approach was therefore chosen to form part of the INCA suite
of tests.
Further, it was recognized that the assessment centre requires a considerable
dedication of time and resource, so the team created a number of on-line tests,
tests that might, in theory, be available for use whenever and wherever a partici-
pant should choose, and that also offered the capacity for on-line external as-
sessment, very much in the spirit of other competence-based assessment ap-
proaches (e.g., the UK e-passport).
The INCA team produced two types of test:
1. cognitive/affective-oriented written exercises for completion on- or off-line;
2. behaviour-oriented group exercises.
For the written exercise items, candidates are presented with critical inci-
dents, along with a series of open-ended questions, such as: ‘What advice would
you give the teams involved for improving their communication?’. A trained as-
sessor scores the responses against the INCA grid. For the group exercises,
since the best predictor of behaviour is behaviour (Kealey 1996), the assessees
work together in a team with counterparts from another culture. They are ob-
served by trained assessors, who score their behaviour against the INCA grid.
(For examples of the different test types and content, see the INCA website,
http://www.incaproject.org/)
Devising the tests was one major task; a second was preparing assessors to
make judgments about participants’ responses to the tests. The INCA grid de-
scriptors (see Table 3) serve as the basis for observational guidelines for exter-
nal assessors. Each test item explores some or all of the identified six elements
of intercultural competence. External assessment is carried out by element, and
according to a detailed description of the assessee’s response. The assessor
marks each aspect of the response as either positive or negative according to the
guideline statements. The aggregate score of negative/positive for that element
of intercultural competence is then set against the descriptors for the range for
that element, from Basic to Full competence, and the assessee’s level of com-
petence determined.