Traditional Assessment

Traditional Assessment

Traditionally, assessment is held at the end of teaching-learning process. Its purpose is to know whether the students have understood the subject that is learned or not. Certain grade is used to decide the understanding degree of the students to the subject. If the students get a good grade at the test, it means that they passed. On the contrary, they didn’t pass if they get bad grade. This notion is the traditional notion of assessment (Budimansyah, 2002).

According to Solomon (2004), the traditional purpose of assessment is to summarize student knowledge and progress at the conclusion of a unit of study. Traditional assessment includes multiple-choice questions and asking students to respond the questions with short answers.

From those notions of assessment, it is clear that traditional purpose of teaching and learning process is in order the students can respond the questions with correct answers. The product of learning is more emphasized then the process it self. Teacher gives quizzes and tests to assess cognitive aspect only. This kind of assessment is just recall students’ memorization. This is seldom requiring students to apply what they know and can do in real-life situations. It encourages instruction of less important skills and passive learning.

Table 2.1 bellow represents differences between Traditional Assessment and Portfolio Assessment (Brown, 2004:13).

Table 2.1   Traditional and Portfolio Assessment