Reforming the Assessment of Student Achievement in the Senior Secondary School

The challenge that confronts agencies responsible for assessment and reporting in the senior secondary school is to extend systematic assessment procedures to a broader range of learning outcomes than those currently assessed by public examinations, to develop methods of reporting which are more descriptive of individual achievement and which provide a better basis for describing and maintaining standards, and to provide results which are sufficiently comparable across schools to enable fair comparisons of applicants for tertiary study. Some recent developments in assessment and reporting practice are considered with a view to identifying methods and approaches capable of satisfying this diverse set of demands. An approach which is particularly appealing because of its potential to provide simultaneously more descriptive reports of student achievement and adequate levels of comparability is the use of a set of common assessment tasks attempted by all students enrolled in each Year 12 course of study.