Cheryl van Tilburg's Profile

Koretz found that portfolio assessment was not all that useful in evaluating schools or students because one school might require one kind of project, another school quite a different one. It was difficult to compare their work and determine whether the standards were high enough. Teachers, Koretz found, also complained that portfolios were cutting into valuable teaching time. Math teachers, he wrote, “frequently noted that portfolio activities take time away from basic skills and computation, which still need attention.”

Authentic assessment “is costly indeed, and slow and cumbersome,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a supporter of standardized testing, “but I think its biggest flaw as an external assessment is its subjectivity and unreliability.”