Implications of Educational Assessment Critique for Public Examinations

In formal education, the end of the school year usually heralds high stakes examinations, and the results of these significantly influence subsequent educational or vocational pathways for many students around the world. Such examinations have traditionally been viewed as an equitable, impartial, and meritocratic approach to assessing students’ capabilities, and they are considered to offer a means of accessing opportunities to those who may be disadvantaged by any other form of assessment. Despite the purported meritocratic benefits of high stakes public examinations, some researchers have noted issues pertaining to the inferences that can be drawn from their results. In this chapter, I consider potential ways in which the critique of educational assessment that I articulated in Chap. 2 may help to explain some of these issues.