An important source of inspiration for this issue of Studies in Educational Evaluation came to us during a talk with a 10 year old boy. He was studying at a music school. At the end of the school year, he was told to prepare for a test, which he did. On Friday night he went to the music school, well prepared for the test. When he came back home, he was we asked "Well, how did you do on the test?" He answered that no test had been administered. After some discussion, he was asked what they had been doing during the two hours of class time. He said they had just done some easy exercises, as they always did. Suspicious about this answer, we asked him about the difference between a test and "simple exercises". The difference was indicated by two simple conditions, he said: firstly, the teacher looks very serious when there is a real test and secondly kids were not allowed to talk to each other during a real test.
A second example that caught our attention was the reaction of second year students at the university. Last year, during an introductory course on learning in the workplace, students studied literature and worked on assignments. The assignments were in the form of authentic problems they had to define, analyse and solve by using the theoretical frameworks they had studied. The main learning goal of the course was to gain insight into the core issues in the field of learning in the workplace. The students' course marks were based on their marks for the assignments and their marks for a case-based assessment, the Over-all test (Segers, Dochy & Cascallar, 2003). The case-based assessment was scheduled for one week before the end of the course.