This article aims at displaying the main characteristics of the national evaluation system in Argentina based on the general framework of creation and development of national mechanisms for the evaluation of education in Latin America. The hypothesis for this study is that the creation and characteristics adopted by national systems of evaluation in the region have been under a significant process of change, especially during the 1990s. Such process of change is characterized by the simultaneous reform of the mechanisms regulating the educational systems in the region. In the first section we analyse the overall educational reforms with which national evaluation systems were created in Latin America, setting their differences with the current national examination programmes in other countries (especially Western Europe, North America and Australia). In the second section we go more deeply into the characteristics of the national evaluation system in Argentina, considering three main issues: its technical characteristics (leaving aside some problems regarding the creation and use of measurements of performance); its legitimacy and the different uses of its results; and the impact shown by evaluation in the national education policies, since the creation of the evaluation system in 1993 up to now. Finally, in the last section, we review the main problems of national education in Argentina and we provide some proposals for the reformulation of some aspects of evaluation policies in Argentina. This could also boost a reflection on the evaluation of educational systems in general, both regionally and internationally.