Keynote Address

SHOULD STUDENTS HAVE TO DO EXAMS AND ESSAYS?:
CHALLENGING EXPECTATIONS IN ASSESSMENT FOR DIVERSITY

Assessment systems in further, adult and higher education have been the key focus for policies that aim to change how the education system responds to political demands for raising levels of participation, access and achievement for an increasingly diverse student cohort. In response, much academic research and professional practice in the field of assessment advocates the dismantling of assessment methods deemed to be elitist, exclusive, old-fashioned, unfair or simply too stressful, such as timed, unseen exams, essays and dissertations. Instead, there is growing use of a diverse range of methods such as on-line assessment, portfolios, presentations and posters, accompanied by injunctions to demystify outcomes and criteria, provide detailed feedback and to use self and peer assessment. There is also pressure to dismantle degree classifications in favour of more qualitative accounts of students’ achievement.

Yet, much of the debate around these alternative methods is uncritical. Notions of inclusion, equity and diversity are contrasted unfavourably with those of standards, elitism, grading and selection. In addition, staff development courses and assessment conferences often treat alternative methods as a simple matter of technical change in order to raise achievement and maximise engagement, rather than as the subject of academic debate. One effect of this technical approach to assessment is to encourage students to be instrumental and consumerist in their own responses to assessment.

Throughout the 1990s, my own research and practice supported such approaches, albeit raising critical questions about the forms of autonomy and motivation they led to. More recently, however, I have questioned whether notions of inclusion and diversity, accompanied by disdain for older methods of assessment, lead universities to depict an increasingly diverse student body as unable or unwilling to cope with challenging forms of assessment. This leads to images of students as either afraid and anxious about assessment and therefore needing more student friendly methods and very high levels of support, or as so instrumental that they will not do any tasks without the reward of marks. Both images offer a diminished idea of students and learning.

In this presentation, I shall draw on recent examples of calls to change assessment in universities to raise critical questions about some of the implicit and explicit underlying assumptions and expectations of students and the implications of those assumptions and expectations for our teaching and assessment practices.

Questions

• What assumptions and expectations lie behind calls to change assessment in your university?
• To what extent is a ‘diminished’ image of students evident in these changes, even if this is an unwitting image?