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External Examination versus Internal Assessment: The Israeli Maturity Certificate

Education certification is by now firmly established as part and parcel of modern life. While there are those who regard this development with serious misgivings,' the prevalent view seems to be that educational certification is an essential tool serving modern society, acting variously as an indicator of scholastic achievement at successive stages of the educational system, as a device for gaining entry into favored jobs and careers, and as a condition for upward mobility within the educational system itself. It is all the more important, then, that the information proffered by these certificates should accurately reflect the educational attainment of the holder. This is particularly true of the certification marking the successful completion of academic programs of study at secondary high schools, at the onset of adulthood, such as the baccalaurdat in France, the Reifepriifung in Germany, high school graduation in the United States, or the bagrut ("maturity" examination) in Israel. Although considerable intercountry heterogeneity exists in the types of methods used to grade students for this level of certification, one may broadly identify two major but directly contrasting systems: external examination and internal assessment. In the external examination method, exemplified by the English Advanced Level examination of the General Certification of Education (GCE), pupils are examined by an external examination board, either appointed by the ministry of education or working under the auspices of various university examination bodies. While certification by external examination offers the clear advantages of a uniform syllabus for all schools and grading by common standards, the method suffers from being administratively cumbersome, lengthy, and expensive. More important, it exerts a confining, even debilitating, effect on individual creativity in both teaching and learning, since the