Pre-Quality Assurance Checklist

✅Your badge description starts with:

Why? 

These conventions are in place to ensure consistency across every badge you write, regardless of the audience.

Individuals are often referred to as different labels, e.g., student, pupil, learner, individual, participant, and so on.

For this reason, when writing digital badges, we refer to any individual receiving the badge as an “Earner”, unless the badge is being issued to an organisation.

✅Read Choosing a layer of the RSA Badge Standard.

Why?

Every badge written through us is quality assured to The RSA Badge Standard, which shows how earners are learning and using new skills and adds value to your badge offer.

The Badge Standard is often a talking point during the QA process, either because the layer for a badge needs to change, or additional information would help to cement it.

✅Each answer to this section contains no more than 4 words.

Why?

Tags work best when they are easy to read and can align with other badges and activities on the destination issuing platform.

Tags that are very long can often make badges difficult to understand and can prevent the badge appearing in specific keyword and skill searches.

For example, instead of entering “Increased Self-Motivation”, simply enter, “Self-Motivation”. Instead of “Learning to Communicate with Others”, enter “Communication” or “Interpersonal Communication”, and so on.

✅Section contains 2 or more 'Criteria - Description' fields (bullet points)

Why?

Badges containing only 1 x bullet point rarely contain enough detail to pass the ‘Stranger Test’ as part of QA. We recommend a minimum of 2 x bullet points per badge.

For more information, please read How to write earning criteria.

✅Every bullet point starts with:

“Earner has”
or
“Organisation has”

Why?

As above for Badge Description, these conventions ensure consistency across every badge you write.

✅Acronyms and abbreviations are clearly explained

Why?

Badges containing acronyms or abbreviations can often be confusing for readers and are less likely to pass the ‘Stranger Test’ as part of QA.

If your badge requires use of acronyms and abbreviations, ensure these are clearly explained the first time you use them by writing it out in full and then adding the abbreviation/acronym in brackets e.g.:

• Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
• Expression of Interest (EOI)
• Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH)

✅You have not included any of the same tags entered into Sections 2 or 5.

Why?

This section should contain a minimum of 3 distinct skills.

There are multiple parts of this form where your answers will appear as tags on the published badge. On every issuing platform, tags appear in one list together.

Entering skills here that are already entered into Section 2 will make them duplicates, and they will be deleted as part of QA. This can sometimes lead to badges not containing enough tags.

✅You have mentioned every skill in your Section 3 bullet points.

Why?

Explaining how earners have developed and demonstrated skills is an important element of doing digital badging well, as it supports your earners to articulate their experience.

Skills tags that are not mentioned in earning criteria are often deleted as part of QA, or, badges are returned to the writer with a suggestion to reference the tags as a way to add more detail.

For more information, please read Referencing skills tags in earning criteria.