ABSTRACT
When a graduate arrives in a department of education he has just emerged from a long process of education, culminating in the final degree examination which has provided him with his passport to the teaching profession. Looking back on himself, as a learner, passing through a series of tests and examinations, he may reflect that some of his examiners were also his teachers, while others were people who never knew him as a person at all. His image of schools and of the teaching-learning process will inevitably be coloured by his own past experiences as a pupil, and in this experience the successive examination hurdles may loom large. But he is also looking ahead to his own future role as a teacher. In the course of the year he will be required to ask himself some searching questions about the relationship between teaching and assessment and about the extent to which the one will influence and be influenced by the other. From the beginning, as a student in the department, his attitudes to the staff who teach him are bound to be affected in some way by his knowledge that they must ultimately award or withhold from him the Certificate in Education for which he is working.
