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and fair assessment system, the NCVQ opted to create their new National Vocational
Qualifications (NVQs) as entirely criterion-referenced, with a lead body for each
industry listing the required ‘competences’ for each of the five levels of award. Two
leading theorists in the vanguard of the move to criterion referencing explained the
advantages of the new model:
Indeed, in many norm-referenced systems of assessment - especially in
education - the chief function of the assessment appears to centre on
differentiation. In NVQ assessment, reliability is not an issue. ...Standards are
valid if the evidence meets the performance criteria.
(Jessup and Burke 1990)
This iiseductive promise...of complete clarity'' offered by the criterion-referenced
assessment of NVQs was neatly demolished by Wolfin her 1993 paper for the Further
Education Unit (FEU) Through the use of clear examples, she demonstrated that
''while assessment systems may vary in the degree to which ...complex judgements
come into play, such judgements are universal to all assessment'' (Wolf 1993: 6). In a
later book, Professor Wolf chronicles the failure of all the bright hopes invested in
NVQs (Wolf 2002b), but the NCVQ’s espousal of criterion referencing had
strengthened existing interest in the use of this new and apparently fairer system
within English educational circles.
The growth of a perception that examination assessment in England was abandoning
norm referencing was enhanced in the spring of 1986 with the ‘cascaded’ training of
all secondary school teachers for the new GCSE examination, teaching for which was
to begin in September 1986. Lulled by the mantra that the assessment process for the
new examination was designed to demonstrate what pupils ‘know, understand and can
do, teachers underwent a fundamental shift in thinking about assessment. The notion
of the ‘bell curve’ of results with all its faults gave way to a belief that henceforth a
new and fairer system had been created.