The Junior Cycle Reform reduced the significance of a national exam at lower secondary level, by introducing continuous assessment conducted by teachers. Increasing teacher’s role in student assessment was controversial and sparked a national debate concerning the extent to which teachers should be involved in the assessment process. This chapter relates this Irish debate to developments elsewhere; countries that have taken very different approaches to student assessment in recent curriculum reforms. In particular, we compare how second level teachers perceive their role in student assessment in Ireland, Finland and Sweden. This leads us to argue that it is important to understand why similar quality and quantity of decision-making capacity can be perceived differently by teachers working in different contexts. Furthermore we argue that the tension between decisions to be made, how and by whom those decisions are controlled, and associated complexity and risks, create context-specific teacher autonomy mindsets, which constitute how autonomous a national teaching profession perceives itself.