At Yew Chung International School of Beijing we are introducing CEM assessments. These assessments will be in place from the start of our 2019-2020 school year. CEM stands for The Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring at Durham University. It is one of the largest and most established research groups offering academic learning assessments for children. CEM is used by educators in more than 70 countries and was founded more than three decades ago.

At YCIS Beijing we believe in meaningful, authentic assessments of our students to ensure they are being appropriately challenged. While by nature this type of formative assessment process is dynamic and ongoing, summative assessments are also a useful complement to our hands-on, individualised approach. We use summative assessments to track our developing scholars’ level of educational attainment in line with that of their peers and respected, independent standards. By selecting CEM as our summative assessment provider we will also be able to measure our students’ future potential, which will help us to further understand and respond to their personal educational needs.

CEM will be used as a standard summative assessment tool across YCEF, which includes all YCIS schools and our Chinese language YWIES counterparts. The tests will be administered at the beginning of each academic year to Years 1-13. The test is not a pass / fail assessment, but instead provides a snapshot of each child’s academic level. Administered online, the test will assess academic proficiency, evaluate pattern recognition, and measure English proficiency. By introducing CEM we hope to empower our teachers to tailor their lessons and methods to each students’ strengths and areas to be developed. This will enable the students to have more ownership of their learning goals from the very start of each school year. We are also pleased that we will be able to share the assessment results with parents much more quickly than with past summative assessments.