While students around the world received last summer their report cards and diplomas, in Switzerland, the Federation of Swiss Enterprises (Economiesuisse[1]) recently took a stand on the issue of grades, in a policy paper entitled “Debate on grades at school: we’ve lost our way…”.

Recent Holistic Assessment SIG seminars have prompted reflection on what we mean by the term ‘holistic’, a word often employed in education as a token of approval without clear definition of what it means in practice.

What is the state of educational assessment a quarter of the way into the 21st century? What lessons have been learned from recent decades and what is the agenda for the next quarter century?