Dutch secondary schools offer educational programs on four tracks, vocational and nonvocational. At the end of each program, a final examination is administered, with the test content areas determined by law, by the schools, and by the student's individual program. Assessment is by means of a written, nationally administered exam and locally-determined measures such as written papers, tests, and projects. In most cases, grading of the national exams is a combination of absolute and relative grading, based on the need for comparison with national norms and the need to assess individual progress. The government has proposed that national and school assessments have more distinctive and different objectives. However, various new government proposals for changes in the secondary school system would also have implications for the assessment system. In the case of both native and foreign language testing, influences come from more than one side. The current combination of a national reading comprehension test and local tests of writing, listening, and speaking would be significantly affected by the proposed curriculum change at the same time that foreign language testing in general is taking new approaches to assessment. (MSE)