Teaching in Higher Education

The politics of assessment

Assessment is profoundly political in how it shapes students’ lives, futures and identities. The contemporary student experience of higher education is filtered through grades, examinations, scores, quizzes, tests, feedback comments, metrics, rankings, grade-point-average calculations, and learning analytics. However, assessment scholarship has paid limited attention to matters of power, identity, equity, and social justice. Assessment is often discussed as something ideally objective, rational and scientific, and thus deeply apolitical. Universities across the globe aim to ensure that assessment is neutral, with practices such as anonymous marking and grade moderation as testaments to this. Students themselves are rarely taught to critique assessment, let alone to bend its structures.

In this special issue, we invite authors to explore the politics of assessment; to engage with socio-political ideas and theories, aiming to better understand and interrogate the hegemony of assessment in higher education settings. In an age characterised by wars, inequities, climate crises and disparities of wealth, how can assessment be apolitical? Assessment scholarship must position itself more firmly within the political world. Doing so will require socio-political theories and sensitivities.

For assessment is not apolitical, but a part of the fabric of life in higher education, to borrow Gordon Stobart’s (2008) words, and indeed something that actively shapes this fabric itself. Assessment has long been theorised as a mechanism of control, discipline and selection (Raaper 2019; Taras 2008). Challenging the hegemony of assessment as a neutral or benign practice requires critical approaches that are committed to surfacing issues of power and control (Nieminen 2024). And despite the now healthy literature on critical pedagogies in higher education, the problem identified by Reynolds and Trehan (2000) over two decades ago remains: little of it extends to the field of assessment. Critical voices have always been present in this field, yet they have largely remained at the margins of assessment scholarship.

This special issue thus aims to bring socio-political theorisations of assessment from the margins to the very centre of assessment scholarship. It seeks to disrupt the long legacy of neutrality in assessment, and all of its remnants are still embedded in our day-to-day practices and assumptions.

Focus of the special issue

This special issue seeks to gather a breadth of critical perspectives to understand the politics of assessment in contemporary times. We welcome submissions that aim either to better understand current assessment hegemonies and/or to transform assessment towards more just and equitable futures, in policy or practice. We welcome all kinds of submissions, including empirical projects, conceptual and philosophical studies, policy reviews, and research synthesis papers that take an explicitly socio-political view of assessment. All articles should adopt a critical approach to teaching in higher education, aligning with the journal’s scope. Abstracts without strong theorisation will not be considered.

This special issue is accompanied by a Points of Departure (PoD) article, ‘The politics of assessment: challenging the legacy of neutrality’, by Nieminen, McArthur and Fawns. This article is intended to open the conversation and elicit further debate on the theme. The following viewpoints, explained further in our PoD paper, illustrate the sorts of critical and socio-political approaches to assessment this special issue focuses on:

• Teacher and student agency: Who decides how and why assessment is done?
• Identity, diversity and inclusion: How does assessment exclude and marginalise, and how can it be more equitable?
• Grading and ungrading: How to disrupt the status quo?
• Critical theory: How to challenge power and privilege in assessment?
• Epistemic injustice and colonisation: What counts as legitimate knowledge in assessment?
• Politics of technology: How does assessment take place in a digital world?

This list aims to stimulate thinking and should not be seen as exhaustive.

To this end, we have assembled an Online Collection of 15 articles from past issues of Teaching in Higher Education that address themes central to this new special issue and serve as exemplars of the types of texts we are seeking. They exemplify that critical voices have long been present in assessment scholarship. We encourage the submitting authors to engage with this inspiring body of earlier work.