In the last years´ educational policy discourse comparability of educational attainments has gained high priority. One important movement on a European level was the design of the EQF (EP/Council 2008). A closer look at individual European countries in this context shows rather different approaches: While countries like Finland (Freymann von 2002), Sweden (Erickson/Lander 2007) or the Netherlands (Bruggen 2000) have a long tradition of output control through central testing with coexisting school autonomy, Germany and Austria are historically coined by input regulations. Nowadays a converging tendency can be observed: Because of growing school individuality also in these countries a certain kind of external evaluation is needed (Aff 2008). Therefore in Austria national educational standards (Schulunterrichtsgesetz 1986a) and central upper secondary school leaving exams (Schulunterrichtsgesetz 1986b) have recently been enacted.

Although the authors welcome this shift in perspective, they worry, at the same time, about an extreme swing of the pendulum towards output control, which would imply negligence of input. To counteract this, they worked out an innovative concept for Austrian VET colleges (especially colleges of business administration) which links both input (aim: improvement of teaching and schools) and output instruments (aim: external evaluation).

The central instrument of this concept is a comparative assessment referring to the core contents of one school year. This test is organised and corrected by the teachers of each individual school by following the four-eye-principle. Results are discussed among teachers (teacher´s meeting) and feedback is given to each student. (Maier 2008, Vortmann 2005) To support this completely new approach for Austria, three additional input instruments are provided:

Ø  a core curriculum based on a competency model which formulates educational objectives and professional competencies, which students are expected to attain by the end of a school year (Böttcher n.d., Fortmüller/Langmann 2008),

Ø  assignments in form of case studies to concretise the contents of the core curriculum (Euler/Hahn 2007, Thonhauser 2008),

Ø  an in-service teacher training to provide information about aims and usage of the instruments.

The objective of this comprehensive concept is to ensure comparable core competencies for all students and concurrently support learning processes. Comparative assessments with open case based assignments are supposed to be most appropriate for measuring professional competences. Moreover, they have the potential to enable improvement of teaching as well as diagnostic feedback to students (Kühle/Peek 2007).

Derived from that the central research questions are:

1. How could a comprehensive concept for ensuring comparable professional core competences in VET colleges look like and how could - in this context - a comparative assessment be designed?
2. What are the effects (improvement of student’s learning outcomes, acceptance by teachers/students, attributed potential for improvement of teaching and schools as well as for external evaluation) of the implementation of such a concept, especially of a comparative assessment?

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