Abstract
Student assessment in the Czech Republic is still rather traditional, with classroom practice continuing to focus on summative assessment. The country has regularly participated in international surveys, but the findings from these only started to influence educational policy during the past decade, when Czech students’ performance fell markedly in all assessment domains.
The principal response has been to introduce standardised school-leaving examinations at different points in the primary and secondary school systems. The examinations have several widely acknowledged shortcomings, however, and in the meantime assessment for learning remains a neglected area.
The improvement of evaluation and assessment practices in the Czech Republic is hindered by low levels of expertise among teachers, principals and policy-makers, and the private sector testing agencies that have become very active in the country suffer from the same weaknesses.