Assessment Standards: A Manifesto for Change
Professor Margaret Price
Berry O’Donovan
Dr Chris Rust
Jude Carroll
Oxford Brookes University
Assessment standards are at the heart of the assessment process underpinning everything from
assessment strategy to design and marking. For students, assessment standards provide guidance for
their learning, allow them to monitor their progress and will ultimately be used to judge their
performance. Yet there has been little serious consideration of the nature of assessment standards or
their effective communication between stakeholders (primarily staff and students but also employers,
professional bodies and government). However amid accusations in the media about dumbing down
there have been wider concerns expressed about assessment and assessment standards not least in the
Burgess report which identified a range of problems, including reliability and communication of
assessment standards.
In response to these concerns the Assessment Standards Knowledge exchange (ASKe), the Centre for
Excellence in Teaching and Learning, has established an international forum of experts on assessment
in higher education (the Weston Manor Group) to consider issues around assessment standards and
make proposals about changes to policy and practice. The group is clear that learners who engage in
assessment are entitled to fair and transparent assessment practices and standards. However, it is the
group’s view that assessment standards reside in the practices of academic and professional
communities and in the nature and level of the tasks in which learners engage, rather than being fully
describable in statements of learning outcomes or marking criteria. In addition, the group believes that
there is an over-emphasis on the measurement of learning, often at the expense of assessment for
learning. These fundamental evidenced-based beliefs underpin the Manifesto for Change which the
group is putting forward with a view to stimulating debate across the sector and, more importantly, as a
step towards bringing about necessary changes in policy and practice. The rationale and evidence for
the tenets of the manifesto are presented in this paper.
Tenet 1
Acknowledgement of the importance of assessment in student learning is well established in the
literature
“Assessment is at the heart of the student experience” (Brown, S. & Knight, P., 1994)
“From our students’ point of view, assessment always defines the actual curriculum”
(Ramsden, P.,1992)
“Assessment defines what students regard as important, how they spend their time and how
they come to see themselves as students and then as graduates.........If you want to change
student learning then change the methods of assessment” (Brown, G. et al., 1997)
and yet there is considerable evidence that the assessment used does not set standards that are
appropriate for high level complex learning that one would expect to be central to higher education.
“The types of assessment we currently use do not promote conceptual understanding and do
not encourage a deep approach to learning………Our means of assessing them seems to do
little to encourage them to adopt anything other than a strategic or mechanical approach to
their studies.” (Newstead, 2002, p. 3)
“Conventional assessment procedures are unable to do justice to the most important outcomes
of any educational process worth the name” (Raven, 1991, p. 1)
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“Even when lecturers say that they want students to be creative and thoughtful, students often
recognise that what is really necessary, or at least what is sufficient, is to memorise” (Gibbs,
1992, p. 10)
Knight (2002) reviewed and discussed the assessment process in higher education and concluded that
summative assessment processes are in “in disarray” ( p. 275). Such disarray requires the review and
reappraisal of the curriculum and in particular the role of assessment. This underpins the first tenet of
the manifesto:
The debate on standards needs to focus on how high standards of learning can be achieved through
assessment. This requires a greater emphasis on assessment for learning rather than assessment of
learning.
Tenet 2
While acknowledging that assessment retains a role for measuring performance, it must be
acknowledged that our current systems, which focus on marks and grades, are not working. Rust
(2007) puts forward a number of embedded beliefs that evidence the fallibility of marking systems:
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Belief that it is possible to distinguish the quality of work to a precision of one percentage
point (Elander & Hardman, 2002)
Belief that double-marking will ensure fairness and reliability
Belief that consistency can be achieved through conformity and simple numerical rules (e.g.
level 1 essay 3,000 words, level 3 essay 5,000; or no more than two pieces of assessment per
module)
The combination of scores, which obscures the different types of learning outcome
represented by the separate scores
The distortion of marks by the type of assessment (e.g. coursework compared to examination)
and the actual subject discipline/s studied (Yorke et al., 2002; Bridges et al., 2002)
The distortion of resulting degree classifications by the application of idiosyncratic
institutional rules (e.g. Armstrong et al., 1998).
Despite this there has been an emphasis on the quest for reliability in marking which has had a
detrimental effect on the role of assessment standards in promoting and developing learning.
“This quest for reliability tends to skew assessment towards the assessment of simple and
unambiguous achievements, and considerations of cost add to the skew away from judgements
of complex learning” (Knight, 2002b, p278)
“…summative judgement itself is the problem” (Burgess, 2007, p. 8)
“Many research findings indicate a declining use of deep and contextual approaches to study
as students progress through their degree programmes. (Watkins & Hattie, 1985; Kember et
al., 1997; Zhang & Watkins, 2001)
“…students become more interested in the mark and less interested in the subject over the
course of their studies.” (Newstead, 2002, p. 2)
This evidence underpins the second tenet of the manifesto:
When it comes to the assessment of learning, we need to move beyond systems focused on marks and
grades towards the valid assessment of the achievement of intended programme outcomes.
Tenet 3
The role of assessment standards in supporting assessment for learning must be supported by
commonly held understandings of the standards. As Sadler (1989) points out, an indispensable
condition for improvement in student learning is that “the student comes to hold a concept of quality
roughly similar to that held by the teacher” (Sadler, 1989).
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However, the dominant model of transparency and sharing of standards in higher education relies on
explicit criteria and level descriptors which have been shown to be inadequate because many aspects of
quality cannot be communicated through explicit criteria. Admittedly there are some standards that are
amenable to explicit articulation. Sadler (1987) labels these as regulative and logical criteria where
“standards can be defined in terms of well-defined outcomes” (Sadler, 1987, p. 70). However, he also
identifies prescriptive and constitutive criteria which refer to matters of degree and “It would be
difficult or impossible to guess the educational level at which they are applicable… ” (Sadler, 1987, p.
70). Such types of criteria are often interdependent and can only be assessed using
holistic/professional judgement (Sadler, 2008). Meaningful understanding of standards, and therefore
holistic judgements, requires both tacit and explicit knowledge (O’Donovan et al. 2004). However,
tacit knowledge is experience-based and can only be revealed through the sharing of experience—
socialisation processes involving observation, imitation and practice (Nonaka, 1991)— which means
that most criteria are socially constructed and this requires the sharing of tacit knowledge over time
(O’Donovan et al., 2004; Rust et al., 2005).
This evidence underpins the third tenet of the manifesto:
Limits to the extent that standards can be articulated explicitly must be recognised since ever more
detailed specificity and striving for reliability, all too frequently, diminish the learning experience and
threaten its validity. There are important benefits of higher education which are not amenable either
to the precise specification of standards or to objective assessment.
Tenet 4
Coming to understand assessment standards requires the development of tacit knowledge which
involves the sharing experience and ‘making sense of the world’ which is a social and collaborative
activity (Vygotsky, 1978). For both staff and students developing an understanding of assessment
standards applied to high-level complex learning can only be understood through active engagement
with members of the disciplinary community that ‘holds’ those standards. We know that some
processes, such as feedback, exist to support the development of understanding but passive receipt of
feedback has little effect on future performance (Fritz, et al., 2000). It requires active engagement to
foster in depth understanding e.g. dialogue and participatory relationships are key elements of engaging
students with assessment feedback (ESwAF FDTL, 2007). Staff may more readily have the opportunity
to actively engage with standards especially when required to mark work but students’ opportunities to
closely engage with the community are not so obvious. However there is clear evidence that it is active
involvement and participation that fosters engagement, understanding and achievement
“participation, as a way of learning, enables the student to both absorb, and be absorbed in the culture
of practice” (Elwood & Klenowski, 2002, p. 246)
“The only common factor in a study of departments deemed excellent in both research and learning and
teaching is high levels of student involvement” (Gibbs, 2007)
“The most significant factor in student academic success is student involvement fostered by
student/staff interactions and student/student interactions” (Astin, 1997)
This evidence underpins the fourth tenet of the manifesto:
Assessment standards are socially constructed so there must be a greater emphasis on assessment and
feedback processes that actively engage both staff and students in dialogue about standards. It is when
learners share an understanding of academic and professional standards in an atmosphere of mutual
trust that learning works best.
Tenet 5
Developing an understanding of complex standards through a process of socialisation requires time.
Important aspects of complex, high-level learning outcomes can only be achieved when students are
allowed time to ‘come to know’ the standards in use by the community. Standards will be understood
through practice, observation and imitation. We know that slowly learnt academic literacies require
rehearsal and practice throughout a programme (Knight & Yorke, 2004) and students need to engage as
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interactive partners in a learning community, relinquishing the passive role of ‘the instructed’ within
processes controlled by academic experts (Gibbs et al., 2004). To support the slow learning that leads
to high-level complex learning there needs to be integrated and coherent progression based on
programme outcomes. A focus on programme outcomes and standards rather than incremental
outcomes provides students with a more holistic view and where there is a greater sense of the holistic
programme students are likely to achieve higher standards than on more fragmented programmes
(Havnes, 2007).
This evidence underpins the fifth tenet of the manifesto
Active engagement with assessment standards needs to be an integral and seamless part of course
design and the learning process in order to allow students to develop their own, internalised,
conceptions of standards and monitor and supervise their own learning.
Tenet 6
Assessment standards underpin the assessment process and yet they are not amenable to explicit
articulation and require active participation over time to develop deep understanding. However, their
significant role in both guiding learning and measuring achievement requires safeguards and
mechanisms for consistency. Such safeguards could be delivered through the greater
professionalization of university teachers but there has been slow progress in this regard, in particular
there has been limited attention paid to professional assessment practice. In addition, changes in higher
education (e.g. massification, reduced units of resource, expectations of increased productivity in staff)
threaten the ‘health’ of disciplinary communities and their ability to share and exemplify professional
judgement. It could be argued that in the UK the external examiner system protects and promotes the
consistency of assessment standards but Newstead and Dennis (1994) show that reliance on the
external examiner system to mediate standards within the system is misplaced. Consequently there
must be processes established that will provide confidence in the assessment standards dependent upon
professional judgements.
This evidence underpins the sixth tenet of the manifesto:
Assessment is largely dependent upon professional judgement and confidence in such judgement
requires the establishment of appropriate forums for the development and sharing of standards within
and between disciplinary and professional communities.
Summary
The Weston Manor Group believes that the current dominant logic of the explicit approach to
assessment standards is inadequate and must be challenged. In addition the quest for reliability is
getting in the way of learning when our main concern should be enabling students to achieve highlevel, complex learning. Active involvement by staff and students in the learning community is
essential to reach common understandings of assessment standards. To achieve this there will need to
be a review and evaluation of the allocation of time and resources within learning teaching and
assessment in higher education, but, the Weston Manor Group believes, such change is achievable.
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