ASSESSMENT IN 2025
The chances are that if you are reading this at the start of the new school year, you will have already been involved in preparing, using or implementing some kind of student assessment. Perhaps you are finalising a baseline test, participating in a round of admissions assessments, or been involved in an appeal to one of the boards to grind out the grade that will earn one of your students a place at their first choice of university.
Exam officers and IB coordinators are already finalising arrangements for the coming assessment year, with a sharp eye on entries for resits which will be on us before you know it.
Assessment is such a regular and normal part of what we do as educators that we just get on with it. We also spend a great deal of our time explaining to other people in our community why we think it is important and worthwhile. A lot of discussion is about measuring progress, identifying strengths and using assessment to help target learning support.
As our students graduate, their exam certificates become their passports and their grades the credentials to show what they know.
And yet – is that the very issue that we are uneasy about? Some of our disquiet these days is to do with AI and how it fits in to the ‘system’, but that’s only part of it. Exam grades show what candidates can remember rather than who they are. But when it comes to offering a young person a university place aren’t personal qualities and dispositions at least as important as academic knowledge? If this is the case, how should these qualities be assessed?
This year ITM will be looking at the assessment debate, starting with Steffen Sommer’s manifesto for ‘Assessment 3.0’ that he posted on Social Media in May.
Sommer, the Director of Misk Schools, is more than uneasy about an assessment environment that he thinks needs radical change. Quickly. He argues that the situation is becoming worse almost by the minute. Current mainstream assessment does not allow our students to show their capabilities in a way that is relevant to them and useful both to the universities that they wish to enter and the employers who would like to offer them a job. Furthermore, he thinks that AI, if properly used, is part of the answer.
Let the debate commence!
Andy Homden is Editor of International Teacher Magazine.
FURTHER READING
Dr Steffen Sommer starts the 2025 debate in ITM with his proposition for ‘Assessment 3.0’:
ITM is published by Consilium Education, an independent international consultancy specialising in the support of new and growing school communities around the world.
Our consultants are former school leaders, teachers and lonng-time supporters of international schools.
FEATURE IMAGE: by Getty Images For Unsplash+
Support Image: by Rifky Nur Setyadi For Unsplash+
