As a consequence of the international movement of school accountability, the Swedish school system has gone through comprehensive changes over the last two decades. New curricula, a new grading scale, earlier use of grades, and more explicit assessment standards show this. The purpose of the research was to investigate how teachers of two different school subjects - music and history - deal with the emphasized insistence on evaluations. How do teachers balance between assessment of learning for administrative purposes, and assessment for learning for development purposes? The question also raises issues of recognition of learning and the teachers’ chances of adhering to the learner’s interests. What is recognizeds as signs of learning? Observational and interview data was obtained from a series of lessons in Year 6. Besides the differences between the two subjects, the research implications are that summative assessment dominates and multimodal signs of learning tend to be neglected, when increased assessment is demanded.