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title: 8 Instrument: behaviourally anchored questions in the extended model
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# 8 Instrument: behaviourally anchored questions in the extended model

The question-and-rubric instrument is retained as it is and becomes one of three evidence formats. What changes is its place, not its mechanics. First, an item is now generated for a requirement in the confirmed requirements profile rather than for a competency chosen on its own: the Generation Service receives the requirement, its taxonomy concept and the organisation's template, and the item's description, question and rubric are checked for the same six properties as today – construct clarity, task accessibility, evidence relevance, criteria precision, judgement consistency, separability \[20, 21\].

Second, an item is asked only where the package needs it: when the passport already covers a requirement with high certainty, or when a work probe is the better evidence, the employer's package leaves the question out; this is how the instrument's main cost – reviewer and candidate effort per answer – is reduced without touching its quality. Third, the answer becomes an evidence claim in the shared model: a candidate answer record, scored by the existing pipeline into a level on the requirement's scale, with the judge's criterion judgements as the explanation and the Rasch-calibrated certainty band as the certainty input.

Fourth, the item's result is read per requirement next to the other sources and is never summed with them; the cross-answer view the reviewers asked for comes from the scorecard, not from a change to the item.

Two findings from the pilots turn into requirements on the instrument in the extended model. Compression at the ends of the scale \[1, 21\] is addressed where it arises – in the score model's calibration and in the relevance check of the evaluator – and it is monitored per requirement with the existing Scope 1 metrics; the extension does not hide it behind other sources. And the measured length and relevance effects \[1\] – answers at the 150-word limit, off-topic but well-built answers – stay part of the item's validation, because a work probe or a passport record next to the answer does not make the answer's own score more valid. In short: the instrument keeps its validated scope, its documentation and its release conditions, and gains a defined place in a package that no longer uses it for everything.