AEC Handbook Admissions and Assessment in Higher Music Education

This handbook is primarily about the issue of assessment in Higher Music Education. It attempts to set assessment within the context of contemporary developments in higher education, especially those relating to the Bologna Process. However, it also addresses the question of admissions insofar as making an assessment of an applicant’s musical achievement prior to entering higher education, and of their potential to progress still further in a higher education environment, lies at the heart of admissions processes.

Hopefully, each individual reader of this handbook will find some resonances between both the ideas and the examples given here and his or her own experience. Ideally, the handbook will serve as a
spur to further thought about why we assess the way we do and how we might constantly strive to make our assessments fitter for purpose – more relevant, more consistent and less intrusive into
the all-important process of learning. Those thought processes, as many of us are aware, are not ones that can ever be regarded as finished once-and-for-all; like the quest for learning itself, the
search for the optimum way to assess learning is one of the goals that drive us forward constantly as we try to make our institutions the best possible environments for the professional preparation and
personal development of our young musicians.