Transversal competences define and target knowledge that every human being should develop in school in order to understand the complexity of situations in normal life and act intelligently. However, without anchoring them in concrete situations, the course of development of these competences and their assessment seem to stay rather vague. After defining the concept of competence and sketching the guidelines of competence assessment, the article illustrates the difficulty of influencing critical learning inherent in transversal competence and the necessity of evaluating it. The last part of the article makes suggestions for professionalisation of this activity.