Competence-based education has become the leading paradigm for educational innovation in Dutch Vocational Education and Training (VET). For every vocational field, competences are described at the national level, based on important work-related experiences and described as integrative wholes of knowledge, skills and attitudes. From 2008 on, vocational institutions are legally bound to adopt a competence-based curriculum. As an important part of education, assessments are redesigned as well. It is very difficult, though, to develop valid and reliable assessments suitable for assessing competence development. Traditional testing methods alone are not sufficient in competence-based education, but they need to be complemented with new and different assessment methods (Van der Vleuten & Schuwirth, 2005). Therefore, this paper argues for combining different assessment methods in a Competences Assessment Programme, or CAP. A programme-wide approach to assessment might reduce the problem of making both reliable and valid assessments by reducing the reliability pressure on formative assessment and use the resources freed up to invest in reliable and costly summative assessments (Knight, 2000). Central questions of this study are (1) which quality criteria are needed to evaluate CAPs in competence-based education, and (2) how can these criteria be applied to an assessment programme currently being developed. First, a theoretical framework of quality criteria for CAPs is presented. Then, this framework is applied to an assessment programme currently being developed by OWEN, a Dutch agency that develops assessments for VET systems. Based on a literature review, an expert focus group meeting, and teacher questionnaires (Baartman et al., 2006), 12 quality criteria for CAPs have been developed: acceptability, authenticity, cognitive complexity, comparability, costs & efficiency, educational consequences, fairness, fitness for purpose, fitness for self-assessment, meaningfulness, reproducibility, and transparency. The quality criteria are based on both traditional psychometric literature, and newer or edumetric literature.These criteria were applied to the assessments developed by OWEN for the VET-programme of mechanical engineering. In this assessment programme students collect evidence of their competence development during internships, knowledge is assessed through an Internet-tool permanently available to the students, and 360-degree assessment is carried out by the student, the teacher and the internship supervisor. Information about the assessment programme is collected through study of relevant documents and questionnaires filled out by the users of the assessment programme: students, teachers and internship supervisors.The results of the document analyses show that some quality criteria have been met to a high extent, while more attention needs to be paid to others. As most of the assessment takes place during internships, this increases authenticity, but on the other hand endangers comparability across students. First user experiences of actually carrying out the assessments will be collected on the 7th of February, on a practical training day for teachers and internship supervisors. Their input will be used to improve the assessment programme. Further evaluation of the assessments by the users will be carried out in the third term (April - June) of the VET-programme for mechanical engineering. These results will be reported in the full paper. In total, this paper will provide an example of implementing a theoretical framework of quality criteria for CAPs in the practical design of an assessment programme for VET. Baartman, L. K. J., Bastiaens, T. J., Kirschner, P. A., & Van der Vleuten, C. P. M. (2006). The wheel of competency assessment. Presenting quality criteria for Competency Assessment Programs. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 32, 153-177. Knight, P. T. (2000). The value of a programme-wide approach to assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 25, 237-251. Van der Vleuten, C.P.M., & Schuwirth, L.W.T. (2005). Assessing professional competence: From methods to programmes. Medical Education, 39, 309-317.European / international journal; specific journal still to be decided