Formal assessment is defined as which of the following?

• A. Conducted with informal interviews
• B. Conducted with standardized instruments and uses rubrics
• C. Based on personal impressions only
• D. Differs across schools; no standardization

Answer: (B)

Formal assessment uses standardized instruments with explicit scoring rubrics to measure student abilities in a consistent, objective way. Standardized tools are administered the same way to all students, and rubrics lay out clear criteria for scoring performance. This creates reliable, comparable results that can be interpreted against norms or criteria, and allows for fair progress comparisons across students, classes, or schools.

Informal methods, like unstructured interviews or relying on personal impressions, lack uniform administration and scoring, so results can vary widely by who administers the assessment and the context. That variability makes them less suitable as formal measures.