Assessment Will Eat Itself

Seemingly a lifetime ago I remember writing about the worst mark scheme ever written. Jon Tomsett recently wrote a searing blogpost about a more recent version.

Laura then took me to her classroom, where piles of coursework were strewn across every table, and showed me what she has to mark. She has 29 students’ work to assess, having to write comments to justify her marks in 7 boxes for each student. That is 203 separate comments with minimal, if any, support from OCR. Page after page of assessment descriptors without any exemplar materials to help Laura, and her colleagues across the country, make accurate interpretations of what on earth the descriptors mean.

This is an example — pure and simple — of assessmentitis.

“-itis” is the correct medical suffix since the assessment system is, indeed, inflamed. Distended. Bloated. Swollen. Engorged. Puffed up.

How did it come to this? When you meet people who work for the examination boards, they are — by and large — pleasant, normal, well-adjusted and well-intentioned people, at least as far as I can judge. How can they produce such prolix monstrosities?

Dr Samuel Johnson made the telling observation that “Uniformity of practice seldom continues long without good reason.” The fact that all the exam boards tend to produce similar styles of document indicates that they are responding to a system or set of pressures that dictate such a response.

I suspect that, at its heart, the system has at least one commendable aim: that of fairness, and that of ensuring that everyone is making similar judgements.

In answer to the age-old question: “But who is to guard the guards themselves?” they have attempted to set up an impenetrable Wall of Words.

But here’s the thing: words can be slippery little things, capable of being interpreted in many different ways. Hence the need to add a comment to give an indication of how one interpreted the marking criteria. It has been suggested that “expected practice” (“best practice” to some) is to include phrases from the marking criteria in the comment on how one applied the marking criteria . . .

This is already an ever-decreasing-death-spiral of self-referential self-referring: assessment is eating itself!

Soon we will be asked to make comments on the comments. And then comments on the comments that we made commenting on how we applied the marking criteria.

But here’s another thing: if the guards are so busy completing paperwork explaining how they are meeting the criteria of competent guarding and establishing an audit-trail of proof of guarding-competencies — then, at least some of the time, they’re not actually guarding, are they?

Who is to guard the guards themselves? In the end, one has to depend on the guards to guard themselves. Choose them well, trust them, and try to instil a professional pride in the act of guarding in them.

Pride and honest professionalism: they are the ultimate Watchmen.