When the course is over, students will not be able to depend on you to assess the quality of their learning. If one of our goals is continued learning, students need practice in self-assessment. Assessments can be learning experiences for students. Assessment throughout a course communicates your goals to students so that they can learn more effectively. The following description of types of evaluation might give you some new ideas.
Individual mastery is the primary issue.
The object is to determine whether the student can or cannot perform at a certain standard. How well others perform on the same standard is not considered. Ranking students is the primary issue. A teacher would use a norm-referenced test to compare the reading abilities of students before forming reading groups. This test finds a student's performance level in relation to levels of others on the same test.