We’ve had a lot of requests about whether we’re going to run a session providing info about the compulsory OPD that is offered this year through the Marriage Celebrants Portal. In a word: no. The reason is that there are a bank of multiple choice questions and every celebrant gets a different 25 questions. It would be REALLY difficult for me to run a session covering all the content that is dealt with in the entirety of the bank of questions; we’d have to go through the Act, Regulations and Guidelines in minute detail, and we’d probably be there for a week.
Instead, here are some tips for how to attack your Knowledge of the Law OPD topic (all the answers for the Real Consent topic are included in the PDF booklet within that topic).
Copy and paste
Instead of trying to make your way through the online quiz in one go, copy and paste your questions and answers into a Word document. That way it won’t matter if the online platform times out while you’re working through the questions. You can take as long as you need to work through each question, finding the correct response in the Marriage Act, Marriage Regulations, or Guidelines on the Marriage Act.
Resources
All the answers you could possibly need will be found in one of these three documents:
Guidelines on the Marriage Act 1961 for Authorised Celebrants 2021
The purpose of this OPD activity is to help you familiarise yourself with these resources; bookmark them, download a PDF copy if you want, even print them! They’re your best friend when it comes to marriage law issues.
Working with the resources
No, you don’t need to read the above documents from front to back. They do each have a fairly useful contents page, but even more useful is the Find function. Here’s a video I made for my Cert IV students about how to use the Find function; I think it will help you a lot!
If you’re interested in a bit more info about how to read legislation, check out this video I made for my Cert IV students:
Remembering your responses
Once you’ve figured out which of the multiple choice options you think is correct for each question, you can head back to the portal, open up your OPD activity, and select your answers. Make sure you make a note of which option you choose for each question, because if you get one wrong, the system will NOT tell you which one you chose last time. You do get four attempts, so there’s the opportunity to try each multiple choice option, but this only helps if you can remember which answer you gave previously.
Most importantly…
Remember this is not a test, and it doesn’t matter if you get the all wrong! The only requirement is that you have completed the task and submitted it; there’s no requirement to get a certain number of questions correct, and you will not be penalised in any way for getting the wrong answers. The AGD will use overall statistics from this task to show where celebrants need more information and assistance, and to help them to produce better resources for us.
That’s it! Good luck!
With the OPD – are you saying that even if we have 50% pass rate, the AGD will approve us? I know in previous years we had to get a high percentage to be approved. If you can clarify that will be great. thank you
Interesting tips for OPD. I use the Find Function almost daily now- game changer!! I’m looking forward to completing my first ever OPD once I’m qualified.