The key aspects of this essay highlight changes in the Swedish curriculum from 1970-2011, and how the practice of assessment has developed subsequently. The question we asked was ‘how the assessment practice has changed through the curriculum from 1970-2011 for Swedish teachers in upper secondary school, on the subject of social science?’ The study of change might help us to foresee the future and give us new insights about changes to come and what or whom might create the need for it. The result is based on a thurough reading of the Swedish curriculums Lgy 70, Lpf 94 and Gy 11, Swedish and international literature, research and articles that touch upon the subject assessment. The results provided show a clear tendency towards a more formative practice and towards assessment for learning rather than of learning. This result is then compared to international tendencies where we try to analyze some of the changes in Sweden and compare them to changes in other western countries that contribute to our research. A wide range of perspectives is used to interpret the effects of the given changes during the timespan. We use different perspectives that, on one hand, focus on the changes in the classroom and on the concept of knowledge, and on the other hand, on the societal changes that ripples all the way down to the teachers’ everyday work. The theories used to analyze the results come from prominent Swedish scholars that have done considerable research on the subjects’ assessment, education and learning. Theories such as frame factors and sociocultural concepts of learning helped us to focus our result to strictly top-down factors of changes in the assessment practice.