Curriculum alignment is the conscious congruence of three educational elements: curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Alignment is rooted in the belief that instructional plans are established through outcomes-based content goals and the goal of assuring that delivery and assessment are congruent. Platform unity, based on the Principles of Performance Instruction, is a way to uphold curriculum alignment. The integration of planning and evaluating is often neglected in traditional approaches to instruction. Performance Instruction holds that course content should be planned, delivered, and evaluated consistently to assure unity. Test creation, for example, needs to be related to content planning decisions. The domain-level at which content is planned becomes the basis for creating test items, with content planning and testing at the same domain level to assure unity. In the theoretical literature, considerable attention is given to faculty's inability to plan and test content consistently. These are arguably important and necessary faculty tasks, and should be the focus of staff development. Unfortunately, even the literature on planning and testing treats them as separate, independent activities. Many faculty have had no formal coursework or in-service training in assessment. As a result, classroom tests are usually short, objective, and of poor technical quality and usually call for the memorization of facts. There is little research in the assessment field regarding practical tools to help faculty evaluate criterion-referenced tests. By looking at the theoretical literature on planning and evaluation, one sees the need to move to practical implications for the benefit of aligning the planned and tested curricula, thus achieving efficiency, effectiveness, and overall unity of instruction. (Contains 104 references.) (KP)