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• Create Date August 2, 2018
• Last Updated August 2, 2018

What’s holding things up?

It is more than five years since the Web-Based Education Commission to the President and Congress made the pithy and wickedly accurate observation: ",Too often today’,s tests measure yesterday’,s skills with yesterday’,s testing technologies",. How much has really changed in those five years? Education systems are driven by the demands of public examinations, both national and international, which control key rights of passage and bestow qualifications. Such examinations often carry the duty of maintaining cherished historical ",standards", and this can make them quite conservative in their response to change. Web-based technologies have the power to completely transform educational assessment, not only making it much fairer and many times more valid and reliable, but turning it into an integral part of the learning process with very real benefits for every student. The great educational advances promised by the Internet will only be realized when public examinations adapt their methods and procedures to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by new technology. A good starting point might be to increase the weighting given to continuous assessment, which web-based systems can handle particularly well, and apply best practice here where it will have the most immediate effect.

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