Assessment is the key to ensure the quality of education and to perform social accountability. After more than 20 years of assessment practice in colleges and universities, an assessment model with Chinese characteristics for higher education has been formed. However, how to ensure the effectiveness of assessment is still a daunting challenge faced by the current education administration departments and colleges and universities. It is particularly important to develop an assessment culture in keeping with Chinese social and cultural characteristics and the development of higher education. In light of China’s national conditions and the characteristics of the popularization stage of China’s higher education, this paper summarizes the assessment experiences, and draws lessons from American assessment cultural approaches, such as the culture of organization and management, the culture of consensus for quality standard, the culture for evidencebased assessment, and the culture for participation and quality improvement, etc. In view of the problems existing in China’s current higher education assessment, developing a culture for assessment, such as constructing a threelevel evaluation organization by the government, the society and universities, a quality standard consensus, an evidencebased assessment utilizing institutional research, an “assessmentinterventionreassessment” model, and teachers’ active participation in assessment，etc., plays an important role in forming gradually a stable assessment model.