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I've used both of these tags so far, but I just now noticed I'm the only one to have used the "assessment" tag.

I suppose they can be considered synonymous. And based on Jon Ericsson's post in this thread, it's preferable to propose synonyms than to delete a tag / retag posts. There are some of us here now who can propose synonyms (>1250 rep). So I'm opening this thread to see whether this should happen.

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I believe they can be used separately, and the questions I have posted so far indicate their distinctions.

For example, I asked "Placing incoming college freshmen: basic algebra, pre-calc, calc", and this is truly an assessment question: how do we assess the abilities of incoming students and place them into courses? Implicitly, I suppose this is a grading question: how do I grade a placement test appropriately to get meaningful results? But ultimately, this question is more about assessing abilities.

Contrast that with some questions under the "grading" tag, like "Grading problems that nobody solved" and "How to standardize grading across several sections of a course?". I believe these are also questions about assessing abilities, but ultimately they are more about the process of grading assignments/tests.

So, I think these should be separate tags. (If others feel differently, that is fine.) But I'd like to make public note of this distinction, making others aware of the "assessment" tag so that you can post some appropriate questions under it and make the differences more pronounced.

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    $\begingroup$ This argument makes a lot of sense to me; if there is no opposition it would be great if you could try to put this into the respective tagwikis, on the tag's page, like grading where it say "there is not wiki summary can you help us create one". $\endgroup$
    – quid Mod
    Mar 21, 2014 at 1:29
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    $\begingroup$ @quid: Great, will do. Thanks for the suggestion. $\endgroup$
    – Brendan W. Sullivan
    Mar 21, 2014 at 1:43
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    $\begingroup$ Another use of assessment (that I think is better than 'grading') is how to assign grades to a course: is homework a better tool to assess what student's learned from a course? Take-home tests? Etc. To me, grading means of a specific assignment or exam. $\endgroup$
    – user37
    Mar 21, 2014 at 8:20

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