ABSTRACT
The first step towards the justification of a sociology of assessment is to define precisely what is meant by the term ‘assessment’. If the first step towards the justification of a sociology of assessment is a definition of the range of activities which would fall within such an analysis, the second must be to recognize how central these assessment activities are to the form and organization of education as typically practised today in most societies with any kind of fairly well developed mass education system. The logical third step would then be to establish why assessment has become so integrally connected with the business of mass teaching and learning and, hence, what significance this integral relationship has for the way in which the processes of contemporary schooling relate to, support, contradict or are independent of the society in which they are situated.
