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The art schools which belong to the Association des écoles supérieures d’art de Montréal (ADÉSAM) take on the primary responsibility for training high-calibre, multifaceted artists. Offering recognized professional training, most of them are under various constraints in terms of learning assessment. These range from the artistic uniqueness of a student to the requirement to respond adequately to government regulations which are sometimes difficult to apply to the reality of the arts. Moreover, research on learning assessment in the arts is piecemeal and reveals assessing practices that have been personalized and adapted to the contingencies of each discipline. How then can one examine the diversity of these practices and document the richness of what is done in the schools of art? Such is the premise of a study, presented in this chapter, investigating the assessment practices in the performing arts in four postsecondary specialized schools, with the principal objective of describing their assessment process. To do so, the educational directors of the École supérieure de ballet du Québec, the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal, the National Circus School and the National Theatre School of Canada were encountered and asked to describe the assessing practices of their teachers. These were then analysed based on an adaptation of the assessment process proposed by many authors. The results demonstrate that these schools’ teaching teams establish a process of learning assessment which is sometimes continuous, and sometimes divided, but which reveals a concern with having their students reach their full potential as young professionals.

Objectives
To examine the assessment process of performing arts teachers in Montréal.

To identify original learning assessment practices.

To grasp the importance of a consistent assessment process.