Abstract
National testing schemes have a long tradition in several educational systems. In Slovakia the national assessment is relatively new phenomenon and in the Czech Republic, the first examination using national tests for certification of leaving from upper-secondary education started just this year.
Based on the first experiences with national testing in our countries, more and more proposals are put forward to assign to the test high-stakes for schools, teachers and individual pupils. In this paper I review experiences and research literature on test-based accountability and mainly the recent debate on No Child Left Behind accountability measures.
Based on this literature review I argue, that using tests for accountability brings many negative side-effects, and instead of improving education, test-based accountability could just led to improving test-scores due to test-score inflation. Experiences from USA and UK are summarized in this paper, and the recommendation for the wise use of national testing for monitoring of education progress and for formative purposes is put forward for the case of Czech Republic.