ABSTRACT
The assessment of students is a serious and often tragic enterprise. Less pomposity and defensiveness and more levity about the whole business would be an excellent starting point for improving the process of evaluating and judging our students’ learning. Some lecturers in higher education become stuffy and formal when the talk turns to student assessment. It is as if they measure their own worth as teachers in terms of the difficulty of the questions and the complexity of the procedures they can devise to test and grade their students and to deter cheating. Assessment is all hedged around with a thick bureaucratic mystique designed to form an effective barrier against the inquisitive. The mystique often lightly clothes a profound ignorance about measurement and testing and their relation to teaching and learning.
