2024 WISA Technical Reports

Creating Competency-based Assessment Grade Sheets and a Rubric for Private Pilot Licence Training

Regarding the assessment of pilot performance in research, the current best practice is to use flight instructor ratings. However, having a flight instructor grade the performance of a student pilot during their flight training is not standard practice in Canada, and there is a lack of standardised and detailed assessment rubrics to consider all skill and competency requirements for different flight maneuvers. To address this limitation, this paper presents grade sheets for the 16 exercises assessed during a Private Pilot License flight test in Canada and a rubric to assist in standardising the grading. The developed grade sheets and rubrics are based on Transport Canada and the International Civil Aviation Organisation documents and are intended to be used by flight instructors during flight training in order to track student performance throughout training. In contrast to the single grade assigned to an exercise during a flight test, the grade sheets are designed to assign multiple grades per exercise to provide a more comprehensive and granular view of the performance of the student pilot. These grade sheets have been used in a few studies within the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics. Using this enhanced assessment rubric will help researchers collect instructor ratings of flight performance in a standardised and comprehensive way, and it can also help flight instructors to systematically evaluate students and provide more detailed feedback, as the industry is moving towards competency-based training.