As teachers, we must monitor the progress our students are making every day, week, term, and year. Classroom assessments are one of the most crucial teaching tools for teachers. When assessments are properly developed and interpreted, they can help teachers better understand their students' progress and learning needs, providing them with the resources to collect evidence indicating what information their students know and what skills they can acquire. Assessments help teachers not only identify and track learners' strengths, weaknesses, learning and progress, but also better plan and direct instruction. For these reasons, continuous classroom assessment is the glue that binds teaching and learning and allows educators to monitor their effectiveness and student learning. Despite the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive appropriate training on how to design or analyze assessments. For this reason, when teachers do not have appropriate assessments from their textbooks or teaching resources, they construct theirs in an unsystematic way. They create questions and essay prompts comparable to those used by their teachers, and treat them as assessments to be administered when instructional activities are completed, primarily to assign student grades. In order to use assessments to improve teaching and student learning, teachers must change their approach to assessments by ensuring that they create strong assessments. To ensure their assessments are robust, they should include five core indicators that can be used as steps to follow when creating assessments. The first of these indicators and the first step a teacher must take when creating a strong assessment...... middle of article......tml#lessonJohnson, S., & Media , D. (2013). What are raw scores? | The classroom | Synonymous. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from http://classroom.synonym.com/raw-scores-4447.html Munday, J. (June 9, 2012). TEST CONDITIONS. Retrieved December 1, 2013 from http://www.hishelpinschool.com/testing/test4.htmlPearson, (2013). How standardized tests are created for your child. Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQHoNfdbwMsSchultzkie, L. (2012). Percentiles. Retrieved December 1, 2013 from http://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/math/Algebra/AD6/quartiles.htmStiggins, R., Arter, J., Chappuis, J., Chappuis, S., (2007). Classroom assessment for student learning: doing things right – using them well. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Wormeli, R. (2010). Formative and summative assessment. Stenhouse Publishers. Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJxFXjfB_B4