Assessment plays multiple important roles in higher education, which are being challenged by shifting contexts (such as the presence of artificial intelligence), resulting in traditional assessments no longer serving their intended purposes. To confidently graduate future nutrition professionals, we need to reconsider assessment in nutrition degrees, to ensure it appropriately evidences students’ demonstration of course learning outcomes(1). Program-level assessment (PLA) aims to benefit student engagement and learning and support assurance of learning(2). It focuses on enhancing assessment from a degree perspective and collecting robust information, longitudinally over time, for making decisions on student progress(2). PLA has been successfully adopted in professional degree programs, including Dietetics(3), while implementation in non-vocational degrees such as nutrition science is limited but gaining momentum. Assessment reform towards PLA will require strong buy-in and active involvement from educators(4). To achieve this, assessment reform must be informed by and aligned with educators’ beliefs, values and their perspectives of potential barriers and enablers. This research explored educators’ beliefs about the purposes of assessment and their perspectives on PLA implementation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 STEM educators from eight Australian universities. Participants were drawn from diverse disciplines and included both education-focused and teaching-and-research academics. While this study focussed broadly on STEM educators, nutrition is a science-based discipline that shares its non-vocational nature with many STEM disciplines, suggesting the findings are transferable to nutrition education contexts and can inform PLA implementation in nutrition degrees. Interview questions explored educators’ beliefs about the purposes of assessment, views on the principles of PLA, and the barriers and opportunities for its implementation. Interviews were conducted during 2024 and 2025, and were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using reflective thematic analysis(5). Educators held varying views on the suitability, challenges and benefits of PLA. The benefits of supporting student learning and improving assessment practices were recognised. Educators’ beliefs about the purposes of assessment also mirrored the intentions of PLA, where assessment acts as: 1) a mechanism for measuring standards and competencies; 2) a means of guiding and supporting learning; and 3) an engine of engagement. The complexity of degree structures and constraints around workload and expertise were considered barriers. Certain factors, such as curriculum visibility, were seen as both a barrier and potential benefit of PLA implementation. It was acknowledged that successful PLA implementation requires active involvement from educators, and that the process calls for adequate support, resources (e.g. time, training), clear guidelines and strong leadership. Explicating the alignment between PLA and educators’ beliefs about the purposes of assessment may help to achieve the educator buy-in needed for assessment reform. PLA implementation in nutrition degrees also needs to be sufficiently resourced with time and expertise and driven by strong leadership.