ABSTRACT
This chapter argues Desmond Nuttall and Harvey Goldstein, the impact that different assessment schemes have on the curriculum, both taught and experienced, far outweighs the need for those same assessments to have immaculate psychometric properties. It does depend somewhat upon who is intending to use the assessment results and what they are likely to infer from them. There is also a general recognition of the need to distinguish formative profiles which are produced during a course from summative ones which represent a final assessment and are typically based on an amalgamation over time of the formative set of assessments. Well-established in sport, music and other performing arts, graded tests are relatively recent arrivals in mainstream subjects of the secondary school curriculum, but have already made a dramatic impact upon the teaching and learning of modern languages and, in the Kent/Schools Council Mathematics Project, upon mathematics.
