This code was developed in response to 1992 legislation (PA 87-1039) which required the State Board of Education to develop a code of ethics for test administration. The code attempts to preserve the integrity of assessment and to help ensure that the unethical practices of some educators do not compromise assessment data by producing misleading information. Violation of the code constitutes unprofessional conduct.

During the design stage, educators decide what types of assessment instruments or procedures to use, at what grades, and when during the school year. Those decisions should help ensure that assessment is ethical and fair. (Principles of ethical and fair assessment practices are in bold print.)

A first task during the design stage is to identify why assessment is needed and how the results will be used. Those purposes and intended uses will guide later decisions about when the assessments will be given and the types of assessment instruments or procedures to use. That, in turn, will provide the basis for eventually selecting specific instruments and procedures and judging validity on the basis of the purposes/intended uses of assessment results.

The design provides for sufficient information to meet the identified purposes.

Assessment designs should reflect attempts to ensure that the amount and type of information needed for the specified purposes will be available at appropriate times. Otherwise, the information may not be adequate for making decisions. Using it would be unethical. Judgments of sufficiency should consider whether an assessment covers the breadth and depth of an outcome (or other unit), is an appropriate type of

The assessment provides multiple data points.

Assessment information is usually more dependable and comprehensive if it includes data from multiple and diverse sources, especially if the information has been collected through multiple assessments administered over a period of time. Such information is likely to be much more valid and fair than the results of a single test.

The planned assessment is fair to teachers.

Assessment should be fair to teachers as well as students. Assessment is unfair to teachers if it consumes more instructional time than is warranted by the utility of the information produced or if that information is invalid, unreliable, or misused to judge teachersâ effectiveness inappropriately.

During the development and selection stage, educators make specific decisions regarding the assessment instruments and other procedures they will use to assess students. Those decisions may have a major impact on whether the assessment is ethical and fair. (Principles of ethical and fair assessment practices are in bold print.)

Assessment procedures do not provide valid information if they are not aligned with the content to be assessed. The assessment should be aligned with learning outcomes or instruction, depending on whether the results will be used to evaluate student attainment of the outcomes or the effectiveness of instruction. Alignment also means that the assessment is as comprehensive as and probes the range and depth of thinking skills represented in the outcomes or instruction.

Assessment procedures are valid, reliable, and fair.

Validity, reliability, and absence of bias are essential to ethical and fair assessment practices.

Assessment preparation activities are unethical or unfair if they involve directly teaching specific concepts simply because those concepts will be included in an assessment procedure, unless that procedure is part of an instructional cycle and was specifically designed to assess a limited body of content. Preparation activities may also be unfair if they give some students an advantage over others to whom they will be compared, such as students in a publisher's norming sample. (Principles of ethical and fair assessment practices are in bold print.)

The intent of assessment preparation should be to help make sure that a test does not interfere with studentsâ demonstration of their knowledge because, for example, students do not know how to interpret or respond to assessment questions.

Aligning instruction to assessment to ensure that major concepts are taught is good educational practice. However, teaching actual test items or assessment tasks is unethical. Teaching specific concepts simply because they will be assessed is also unethical.

Unethical and unfair assessment practices that occur during the administration stage usually involve giving some students advantages over others by, for example, giving them more time to complete the assessment, assisting them during testing, or excluding some students from the assessment in order to raise the average scores for schools or other groups of students. (Principles of ethical and fair assessment practices are in bold print.)

Comparisons of students' test scores to one another, to a statewide sample, or to a publisher's norming sample are not warranted unless all students take the test under generally uniform conditions.

Excluding some students from an assessment may be unethical or unfair. In Illinois, it may also be illegal. All students shall be included in state assessment. Students excluded due to provisions in IEPs or participation in bilingual programs shall be assessed using alternative procedures. Also, all students must be accounted for in data used in the Illinois Public School Accreditation System.

Unethical and unfair assessment practices may occur after assessments are administered but before the results are interpreted and used. Such practices include obtaining and using copies of assessment procedures, changing answer documents, failing to use uniform scoring procedures, and not verifying that assessment data are accurate. (Principles of ethical and fair assessment practices are in bold print.)

All professional persons have a responsibility to protect the security of assessment procedures. Large-scale tests, such as Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) and commercial tests, often assess extensive content areas with a limited number of items or exercises. It is essential that students are taught the larger body of content rather than the more restricted items or exercises. Therefore, it is unethical to make or keep copies of such tests or to use them in any way prior to their administration.

Answer documents are treated ethically.

Students' answers to assessment items or tasks should not be altered. It is unethical to mark, erase, or change responses to alter a score. However, it is acceptable to make sure that students

Assessment procedures are scored uniformly.

Uniformity is generally not problematic when tests are scored by machine. However, when they are not, educators should ensure that all tests are scored using the same criteria and procedures in the same manner. Studentsâ scores should vary only because their responses were different, not because different raters assigned divergent scores to equivalent responses.

Data are verified.

Assessment results should always be reviewed to ensure that they are accurate before they are used for any purpose.

Unethical and unfair assessment practices may also involve misinterpreting or misusing assessment results. The misuses include using the data for purposes other than those for which they were collected, violating the confidentiality of individual students and teachers, and reporting results misleadingly. (Principles of ethical and fair assessment practices are in bold print.)

Misinterpretations of assessment results easily lead to unethical and unfair assessment practices. Interpretations should be based on thorough understandings of what was assessed, how it was assessed, how the scores were derived, and what the scores mean. To help guard against misinterpretation, interpretation manuals should be available to all assessment users.

 Assessments are used only for the intended puposes.

Assessments are selected or developed for specific purposes. Validity is examined for those purposes. People frequently invent new interpretations or uses of assessment results, but it is unethical to announce findings or make decisions affecting persons or schools without validating such interpretations or uses.

The confidentiality of individual students and teachers is respected.

State and federal laws protect the confidentiality of individual students. Illinois legislation rules that individual students' scores shall not be entered on permanent records. They shall not be released without written permission from parents. Assessment results should not be presented in a manner which allows them to be associated with individual teachers. Failure to protect the confidentiality of individual students and teachers is unethical and unfair. Further more, releasing the results for individual students may be illegal.

Assessment reports should present results ethically and fairly. Also, they should encourage readers to do the same when they communicate the results to others. Reports should be technically accurate. They should present the data clearly to enable audience members to understand what the data mean and how they should be interpreted. Furthermore, reports should present results comprehensively so that readers' perceptions are constructed from a variety of data rather than a narrow set of test scores.

Assessment results are used to further examine validity.

Because validity resides in the interpretation and use of assessment results, educators should continue to examine issues of validity after data are released. The examination should include both anticipated and unanticipated uses of test data. Questions should focus on whether assessment information is appropriate for each use. If not, it may be necessary to adjust assessment plans (e.g., adopt new tests or tasks), provide additional guidelines about interpretation and use, or more carefully monitor and control interpretation and use.