The Past, Present, and Possible Future of the Russian Education Assessment System

The article describes the key stages in the development of the education quality assessment system in Russia: certification of educational institutions, participation in international comparative studies, implementation of the Unified State Examination (USE) and Basic State Examination (BSE), and the emergence of a community of education assessment experts. The most urgent goals in the development of the Russian education assessment system are seen to be switching to competency-oriented USE and BSE (with the subject-specific component preserved), developing national monitoring studies to compare education quality among regions and municipalities, tracing the socialization patterns of school graduates, elaborating various models of in-class and in-school assessment, and providing tools to measure the individual progress of students. Meanwhile, the lack of competent interpretation of measurement results appears to be the main challenge in education quality assessment.