Dennis Opposs

• Chair at Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation

Seldom have comparative studies of educational assessmentsystems been undertaken, especially regarding their standardsetting procedures. This study examines the effects of govern-ance structures on the power relations in standard setting in thedominant school-leaving or university-entrance examinations.We present acritical analysis of the published...

Preface Alina von Davier The education of the next generation has always been important in all cultures, although a formal educational system was developed or adopted only sporadically in antiquity. One of the earliest formal schools was developed in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, for example. Move forward 2,000 years, about half way between the Middle Ki...

For the past 30 years, school-based assessment (SBA) has been a major feature of GCSEs and A levels, the main school examinations in England. SBA has allowed teachers to allocate marks to their students for the level of skills that they show in their work. Such skills include for example, experimental techniques in science, performance in drama and...

In England, pupils aged 16 take the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations for a range of subjects. The current assessment models for GCSE include a two-tier structure for some subjects and a non-tier model for the others. The tiered subjects have a higher tier designed for high achieving pupils and a lower tier for low achi...

National tests, public examinations, and vocational qualifications in England are used for a variety of purposes, including the certification of individual learners in different subject areas and the accountability of individual professionals and institutions. However, there has been ongoing debate about the reliability and validity of their result...

Since 2010, the whole national cohort Key Stage 2 (KS2) National Curriculum test in science in England has been replaced with a sampling test taken by pupils at the age of 11 from a nationally representative sample of schools annually. The study reported in this paper compares the performance of different subgroups of the samples (classified by gen...

Building on findings from existing qualitative research into public perceptions of reliability in examination results in England, a questionnaire was developed and administered to samples of teachers, students and employers to study their awareness of and opinions about various aspects of reliability quantitatively. Main findings from the study inc...

Abstract Quantifying the reliability (or unreliability) of assessment results is a central part of the work of assessment professionals. Although much remains to be done, methods for calculating and reporting reliabilityindices have been widely discussed. Communicating,with the public about unreliability in test scores has not been