achievement tests attempt to assess what a person has learned following a specific course of instruction.as you saw in chapter 1,the first achievement tests used in the schools were essay test.these were rapidly replaced in the 1930s by standardized achievement tests such as the stanford achievement test,still in use today.these tests were more cost-effective than their essay counterparts, and scoring was far more objective and reliable.however, like their predecessors,standardized achievement tests had as their goal the endpoint evaluation of a student's knowledge after a standard course of training.in such tests,validity is determined primarily by content-related evidence.in other word, these tests are considered valid if they adequately sample the domain of the construct (e.g math,science,or history) being assessed