Norm related assessment is better than criterion related assessment

Assalamualaikum readers!

As we promised that we gonna share the point of our debate yesterday. So here it are :D

Definition of Norm related assessment :

According to the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory site the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (1996); an assessment where student performance are compared to a larger group. Usually the larger group/ norm group is a national sample representing a wide and diverse cross-section of students.

Purposes :

According to Huitt (1996), 

1) To rank each student with respect to the achievement of others in broad areas of knowledge.

2) To discriminate between high and low achievers

Other purposes:

3)To measure how well an individual does relative to other people who have taken the same test.

4)To classify students so that decisions about their opportunity for success (e.g: college entrance) can be made.

Advantages:

# can be generalize and measure a student's performance by comparing it to the performance of other students taking the same test.

#can measure how a school is performing against other school. 

# Reducing time and easy to develop.

#No need to find time to develop new assessments for the students, since they can use the already built assessments.

#Avoid complexity for the teacher and staffs that are already have full workload to write new assessments in order to evaluate students’ performances and achievements. 

# Does not cost a lot of money.

#School authority can just only order the teacher to assess their students and evaluate them based on the assessment provided rather than hiring new teacher or staff who is professional in specific skill which can cost a lot of money in term of paying their salary.

#Make the process of curriculum going smoothly.

Since the test are similar in every school, so it is easy for the curriculum developers to know what is working and what is not working. Hence, the developers would know the suitable curriculum for a particular level of students.

With all these points, it is crystal clear that Norm related assessment is better than criterion related assessment. 

Thank you :)