A Testing Time: the role of subjective practices in making sense of student performance

This paper examines some of the practices and accompanying assumptions that underlie the work of assessing students' written performance. Examiners are shown to give meaning to, and to construct and reconstruct, the answers that their students provide. In doing this resort is made to common sense or taken for granted concepts, many of which involve labelling. Political processes such as power, negotiation and compromise are also identified. In a climate of moves towards mass higher education where written and distant assessment is likely to grow at the expense of face‐to‐face contact, the tendency of examiners, highlighted in this paper, to rely on interpretive and negotiated methods is not only inevitable but justified.