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Assessment:
Virtues and Merits in the Educational Setting

Whether we like it or not, it is a fact of life in general, not just the realm of education, that human beings are assessed on a daily basis. Our performance in life is judges by a panel of our peers, and how we perform is tied to the income that we make and the lifestyle that we are able to live. Competition is as inherent a factor of our existence as is our need to breathe the air and consume nutrients to survive. While it is tempting to hold on to a utopian belief that, without assessments, the world would be a better place, one look at a world of "true" equality such as is presented it Kurt Vonnegut's (1961) pivotal short story Harrison Bergeron:

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General (Vonnegut, 1).

These words are enough to set even the most recalcitrant mind to pondering whether, in fact, Nietzsche might have been right in his ideas about the impossibility of true equality, and it is enough to make even the most reluctant cynic a believer in the ultimate dystopia that would be created by a forced equalizing of all humanity. However, as we look towards a future in which individuality and difference are accepted as the norm, and we reach past the bounds of our preconceived educational hegemony, we must strive to find more diverse ways to assess learning as defined in the academic setting.

Academic assessment needs to be carried out in such a way that the end result of that assessment is a picture of the student as a whole: what he or she has learned, as well as his or her competencies. No two students are alike. The definition of differentiation provides the key to understanding not only the need for a variety of teaching methods, but also for assessments that match those methods:

To differentiate instruction is to recognize students varying background knowledge, readiness, language, preferences in learning, interests, and to react responsively. Differentiated instruction is a process to approach teaching and learning for students of differing abilities in the same class. The intent of differentiating instruction

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