Meaning & use
summative
Last updated
Meanings
adjectivebefore a nounspecialist
Describing a test or evaluation given at the end of a course or unit to measure how much students have learned overall.
Grammar: Appears before a noun: a summative test, not a test that is summative.
Patterns
- summative assessment of something
The final exam is a summative assessment worth half of your grade.
Teachers use a summative project to see what students retained from the semester.
Unlike weekly quizzes, a summative test happens only when the unit is finished.
adjectivebefore a nounrareformal
Relating to a summary or a total, or serving to sum something up.
Grammar: Used before a noun and is rare outside academic writing: a summative statement.
The last chapter offers a summative view of the author's ideas.
She gave a summative comment at the end of the meeting.
Common combinations
- summative assessment
- The district requires one summative assessment at the end of each term.
- summative evaluation
- The summative evaluation showed the program had raised reading scores.
- summative test
- Students prepared carefully for the summative test in June.
- summative feedback
- Summative feedback tells you how you did, but it comes too late to change the result.
- formative and summative
- A good course mixes formative and summative methods.
Synonyms and how they differ
- final
- Final just means last, while summative describes the purpose of judging overall learning.
- cumulative
- Cumulative means building up over time and covering earlier material, whereas summative names an assessment given at the end.
- concluding
- Concluding describes anything that ends something, and does not imply a formal evaluation as summative does.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: summative or formative?
summative vs formative
Formative assessment happens during learning to guide teaching, while summative assessment happens afterward to judge results.
Practice
Weekly practice quizzes are formative, but the end-of-year exam is ______.
Choose one answer.
A summative assessment judges overall learning at the end. Preliminary would describe something done before the main event, the reverse of this exam.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “summative”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.