What is the COMPASS Exam?

Professional regulators are required to establish and monitor the competency of registrants for whom they are responsible. Common practices for regulators include assessment of knowledge concerning applicable legislation, establishment of good character through such investigations as a criminal record check and assessment of professional competency. The assessment of professional skills occurs on several levels:

• You need to know that clients are interviewed.
• You need to know how clients are interviewed.
• You need to show how you would interview clients if someone asks.
• You need to do interviews with actual clients.

In some professions such as medicine or physiotherapy, entry to practice practitioners are required to conduct mock interviews with actors as clients who have been trained to present a standardized set of symptoms typical of known medical conditions. The proposed diagnosis and the observed methods of interaction enter into the evaluation of the practitioner’s skill level. Such an evaluative process is very costly and many alternative approaches have been developed to try to capture the key components of interviewing a  standardized client without actually engaging with real clients. The COMPASS exam is an example of this approach.

The COMPASS test itself is an online, remotely proctored simulation style assessment that presents 10 to 12 realistic settings and clients for test candidates at the entry-to-practice level. This style of assessment allows for in-depth measurement of the candidate’s approach to handling the complexity of client issues without any risk to clients. Simulation-style assessments require the active participation of the candidate being tested. The candidate makes profession-based decisions and receives immediate feedback from the simulated client as in the real world. This particular style of assessment allows for broad sampling and documentation of the candidate’s performance in terms of multiple entry-to-practice competencies in combination with each other and across multiple contexts. The standardization of the tasks and their alignment to practical, real-world issues that bring people to therapy is another value-added feature of this style of assessment [1].

The simulated settings and clients contained in the exam are created by panels of experienced clinicians from many different schools of thought, who jointly agree that the simulation is representative of what an entry to practice psychotherapist might encounter. They also agree that the available choices of action which are provided include options which reflect the style of different modalities and schools of therapy and they agree on the helpfulness score for each choice, reflecting the competencies which underlie the simulation. Your score summed over the simulations determines whether you Pass or Fail the exam. Here is a (simplified) example of what a simulation might be like, with some introductory information about the client (Jane) and a series of choices which the psychotherapist might make. For each therapist action, there is a client response. In a separate column there is an indication of how that choice would influence the final test score.

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[1] Paragraph adapted from content in “Canadian Professional Standard for Counselling and Psychotherapy Competency Assessment 2025: Relational Alignments to FACTBC Entry-to-Practice Publications.” Author: Compass Centre for Examination Development.