The English Examining Boards: Their route from independence to government outsourcing agencies

212

performance'' (Orr 1983: 15), their assessment had always been based on norm
referencing. When GCE examinations replaced the School Certificates in 1952, they
retained the traditional psychometric or norm referenced approach which was based
on:

...the underlying notion...that intelligence was innate and fixed...[and]
therefore could be measured and on the basis of the outcome the individuals
could be assigned to streams, groups or schools which were appropriate to
their intelligence (or ‘ability’ as it came to be seen).

(Gipps 1994: 5)

In 1960, the SSEC spelled out the norms for the Boards to observe in awarding GCE
which were to guide the awarding process for the next twenty-five years. [See Figure
4.5]

"Critics of the psychometric paradigm found problematic the assumptions it involved
of universality and unidimensionality" (Goldstein 1993). Therefore there was perhaps
a predisposition to welcome ‘criterion referencing’, the assessment system Robert
Glaser devised in America in 1963. In his ground-breaking paper he explained the
basis of his system: ⁱⁱJVhat I shall call criterion-referenced measures depend upon an
absolute standard of quality, while what I term norm-referenced measures depend
upon a relative standard" (Quoted in Gipps 1994: 79). Caroline Gipps identified his
ⁱⁱseminaΓ work as ⁱⁱSignalling the emergence of educational assessment as a separate
enterprise from psychometrics and psychological measurement" whose key feature is
that it is ⁱⁱconcerned with an individual’s growth rather than variation between
individuals, and testing is linked to content matter taught" (Gipps 1994: 79). The
elimination of the need for Subjectivejudgements, perhaps the most vexing element of
norm-referenced qualifications, seemed a fairer system which ''appealed to policy
makers and qualification designers" (Wolf 1993: 6).

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