ABSTRACT
In the assessment of student work using standards and marking guides, it is generally accepted that human judgement is central to the assessment process. This observation holds even in examination contexts involving multiple-choice questions. Current assessment debates concern the specificity of the standards and related preset criteria (Sadler 2009; Torrance 2007). Building on published research about judgement, we argue that while attention to standards formulations and representations is necessary, of equal importance is attention to the nature of judgement practice. Agencies, governments, universities and examination boards are preoccupied with the provision of standards with an expectation that such provision will result in consistency and reliability in grading. In effect, standards have been championed as key to public confidence in improvement and more effective education systems. The assumption appears to be made that the act of explicating and publishing official criteria and standards will, of itself, result in improved accountability and transparency. Moreover, this assumption gives emphasis to the explicit or defined features of quality (standards) to the neglect of judgement practice itself. We argue
ire ya t-Smitha l lenowskib
that the focus for the twenty-first century should be: standards and judgement and decision-making. In what follows we explore the complexity of human judgement. We take judgement to mean, ‘the operation of the mind involving comparison and discrimination by which knowledge of values and relations is mentally formulated’ (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 2006). So, ‘judgement comes from the human mind and it is based on what you yourself know, it comes from knowledge of all kinds and from many different sources’ (DiBiago and Hoeg 2006, 42).
