Reliance on face validity reached a high point during the wave of enthusiasm for performance assessment, when many reformers and educators assumed that complex tasks necessarily tap higher-order skills better than multiple-choice items do. People were looking for rich, realistic, and engaging tasks to include in tests, so perhaps it was only natural that the tasks themselves, rather than other forms of evidence that I will describe momentarily, became the sine quo non of validity for many people who did not know better. In response, Bill Mehrens, now professor emeritus at Michigan State
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