Fairness in multicultural assessment systems

This paper is about fairness (equity) in large-scale assessment systems within multicultural societies. It makes the key assumptions that fairness is fundamentally a sociocultural, rather than a technical, issue and that fair assessment cannot be considered in isolation from both the curriculum and the educational opportunities of the students. Equity is defined as a qualitative concern for what is just. This involves, but is not the same as, equality of opportunity and of outcome. In relation to large-scale assessment four topics are addressed: the nature of the assessment system; recognizing experiences of different groups; cultural diversity; and monitoring group performance. The conclusion is that, while we can never achieve fair assessment, we can make it fairer. At the heart of this improvement process is openness about design, constructs and scoring which brings out into the open the values and biases of the test design process.