Kazakhstan is a country undergoing massive educational reform including the introduction of a trilingual policy in all schools.Since 2012, Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) has been working together with departments of the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS) group to produce external assessments which test the knowledge and skills present in the curriculum introduced under the Integrated Programme of Development (IPD).This paper sets out to examine the application of a Western construct of the three primary purposes of national summative assessment to post-Soviet context undergoing educational reform. These purposes are defined as assessment for: learning; certification and school accountability (Black, 1998).