ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the quality of education and about what educational assessment can do to improve it. It examines different conceptions of educational assessment – scientific, administrative, and public-oriented – and determines their potential merits and demerits vis a vis the quality of education. The chapter explains some familiar dilemmas in the execution of assessment, namely, curriculum-dependent versus curriculum-independent measures, norm-referenced versus criterion-referenced assessment, and cognitive versus affective content. Progressive educational philosophies have been haunted by two ideas: self-actualization, in the sense of an uninhibited blooming of supposed, highly idiosyncratic, creative gifts, and: equality, meaning reduction of variance in educational attainment. The quality of education cannot be exclusively assessed as the proportion of pupils or students that can do easy things, nor as the proportion that perform at a high intellectual level; in isolation, such measures are deficient indicators of educational quality.
