Cross institutional collaboration in assessment: a case on progress testing

The practice of assessment is governed by an interesting paradox. On the one hand good assessment requires substantial resources which may exceed the capacity of a single institution and we have reason to doubt the quality of our in-house examinations. On the other hand, our parsimonity with regard to our resources makes us reluctant to pool efforts and share our test material. This paper reports on an initiative to share test material across different medical schools. Three medical schools in The Netherlands have successfully set up a partnership for a specific testing method: progress testing. At present, these three schools collaboratively produce high-quality test items. The jointly produced progress tests are administered concurrently by these three schools and one other school, which buys the test. The steps taken in establishing this partnership are described and results are presented to illustrate the unique sort of information that is obtained by cross-institutional assessment. In addition, plans to improve test content and procedure and to expand the partnership are outlined. Eventually, the collaboration may even extend to other test formats. This article is intended to give evidence of the feasibility and exciting potential of between school collaboration in test development and test administration. Our experiences have demonstrated that such collaboration has excellent potential to combine economic benefit with educational advantages, which exceed what is achievable by individual schools.