For more than seventy-five years, standardized tests have been considered a vital tool for gauging students' readiness for college. However, few people--including students, parents, teachers, and policy makers--understand how tests like the SAT or ACT are used in admissions decisions. Once touted as the best way to compare students from diverse…

Grade inflation has been a consistently ignored problem in the public schools and universities for over fifty years. Grades keep getting higher and higher for a multitude of reasons. Students expect high grades. Parents demand high grades of their children and teachers. Some administrators implicitly or explicitly require that their teachers give…

Internationally, over the last 20-30 years, changing the procedures and processes of assessment has come to be seen, by many educators as well as policy-makers, as a way to frame the curriculum and drive the reform of schooling. Such developments have often been manifested in large scale, high stakes testing programmes. At the same time…

In an effort to balance common academic outcomes, as measured by common course finals, with faculty's individual teaching styles, Johnson County Community College (Kansas) mathematics faculty developed "core components" for 10 of the mathematics courses offered in Spring 1995. The core components were designed by faculty teaching each…