Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation


The Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation is an American/Canadian based Standards Developer Organization. The Joint Committee, created in 1975, represents a coalition of major professional associations formed in 1975 to develop evaluation standards and improve the quality of standardized evaluation. The Committee has thus far published three sets of standards for evaluations. The Personnel Evaluation Standards was published in 1988 and updated in 2008, The Program Evaluation Standards was published in 1994, and The Student Evaluation Standards was published in 2003.
The Joint Committee is a private nonprofit organization. It is accredited by the American National Standards Institute . Standards approved by ANSI become American National Standards. In addition to setting standards in evaluation, it also is involved in reviewing and updating its published standards ; training policymakers, evaluators, and educators in the use of the standards; and serving as a clearinghouse on evaluation standards literature.
The Committee performs its work on behalf of its constituents, namely, the people and groups involved in conducting educational evaluations and using the results of educational evaluations. The Joint Committee has three sets of standards published at this time: The Student Evaluation Standards, The Personnel Evaluation Standards and The Program Evaluation Standards.
Each publication presents and elaborates a set of standards for use in a variety of educational settings. The standards provide guidelines for designing, implementing, assessing and improving the identified form of evaluation. Each of the standards has been placed in one of four fundamental categories to promote educational evaluations that are proper, useful, feasible, and accurate.

The Personnel Evaluation Standards

The second edition of the Personnel Evaluation Standards is based on knowledge about personnel evaluation gained from the professional literature and research/development since 1988. In this edition, six new standards were added to the original 21 of the first edition. The Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation requires that personnel evaluations be ethical, fair, useful, feasible, and accurate. The standards also provide special consideration to issues of diversity.
It is not the intent of these standards to design or promote specific systems of evaluation, rather to ensure that whatever system is in place provides a sound process most likely to produce the desired results.
The four attributes of sound educational evaluation practices are:
The Joint Committee includes sixteen Sponsoring Organizations that reflect a balance of primarily client practitioner and evaluation technical specialist perspectives. These organizations appoint and sponsor a member of the Joint Committee. Each Sponsoring Organization is kept informed of the work of the Joint Committee and is afforded an opportunity to contribute to the standard-setting process. Sponsoring Organizations include the following: