It seems to be a natural law that everything in education goes around in cycles. Having moved away from the rigid testing and formal examination during the "free" seventies, we now seem to be moving back into rigidity with ever greater emphasis on summative examinations. Testing is now seen as a kind of quality control as if the schooling process could be compared to industrial productivity. This assumes that learning somehow is the same as a product whose qualities can be specified, like a properly functioning washing machine or car. It also assumes that tests reveal that significant learning has taken place and that a price tag can be attached to such a test.

Because summative testing is to be always based on the Objectives set for the programme, teacher should spend most of the classroom time on training students to get high scores on such tests. There is a strong under current in our society that consider schools to be incompetent and that they should be held accountable. Performance on such tests is often equated with productivity. Of course schools are accountable but not on the basis of an industrial metaphor. School are in the business of educating children not in training children to do well on tests. General education is not the same as a training course in cable splicing in which the objectives can be clearly stated and achieved because it can be reduced to a single dimension. School exists to teach pupils to widen their their perspectives and challenge their imaginations not to dull their minds by single dimension learning in a mechanistic and narrow way resembling the process of industrial productivity.

By simply concentrating on summative testing at the exclusion of all other evaluation one denies the fact that all significant learning is a "do-it-yourself" job because it is always self-appropriated, focussed on the solving of some problem, or answering some need. Teaching far too often involves the imposition of objectives that are far removed from the students own learning experience and explains much of the alienation in our schools. The learning process can never be compared to the industrial process because it rarely follows a logical and sequential pattern. It is often random, spontaneous, integrated into the individual personality. Try and fit students and teachers into a corset of terminal objectives by demanding that only summative tests can be used to evaluate performance and one has the perfect recipe for educational alienation. The school is already a largely artificial setting, where students are evaluated on how they perform on paper-and-pencil tests rather than on how they solve real problems.

The emphasis on formative testing reflects concerns about stability and order in a society in a state of flux. There is a renewed emphasis on uniforms, strict rules, and sound tradition. For many parents and educators schools are unruly places, testing grounds of new life styles of which they don't approve.

Too much of turning the clock back and schools become increasingly irrelevant and dreadful to most children.

Measuring competence or ability of students has to be done, students would not want it otherwise, what they object to is that they have never been consulted and have never agreed to the objectives. Compare their enthusiasm while achieving competence in freely elected sports activities with their enthusiasm in the school environment.

The whole concept of formative testing as it is practices in our schools is ludicrous anyway because we accept a 60% pass rate, based on a normal bell curve, while a really successful realisation of objectives means that the majority (90% or more) of the students obtain the majority (90% or more) of the objectives. Any suggestion that the schools should accept that criterion is just laughable. Successful realisation also assumed the deliberate destruction of the normal curve of distribution.

A test must be appropriate not only in relation to the objectives, but also in relation to how the students will respond to it.

A test must be effective, that is it must do its job of measuring. It must serve a purpose. What is the purpose of must of our tests? Whom is it for? The parents, the teachers, the school administrators, the students? Ever observed students getting back a grade? Are they interested in the effectiveness of the test? Did they know what they were tested on? Did they know the objectives they studied for?

A test must be practical. In other words, was the test practical in the sense that is is acceptable to both teachers and students?

Educational tests frequently treat each item as an independent piece of information. If one is attempting to assess the degree to which a student has acquired a specific behaviour, it is frequently necessary to consider a series of questions or items as directed toward making an accurate inference about a specific objective. Because of the complexity of much behaviour, a single test item or a single response can provide only part of the information needed. A carefully selected an sequenced series of responses will more completely access the student's competence.

The problem is not that Johnny can't read, the problem is that Johnny can't reason.

What is evaluation for?

1. Evaluation for Instructional Purposes

2. Evaluation as an Incentive

3. Evaluation as a Means of Classifying Learners

4. Evaluation for Certification