Archive | 2021
Ipsative assessment: measuring personal improvement
Abstract
The word ‘ipsative’ comes from Latin ipse, -a, -um, which means ‘self’. This gives us an indication of the meaning of ipsative assessment in education: the evaluation of the quality of the performance of a student by reference to their previous performance(s), not by reference to the rest of the cohort (normreferenced assessment), nor against expected standards based on programme objectives (criterion-referenced assessment). The term ipsative assessment is also used in human resources and psychometric testing, but with a different meaning, to refer to tests where respondents have to select their preferred option out of two or more available ones.