ABSTRACT
Live performances make up significant proportions of many arts degrees including music, dance and theatre studies. There can also be protoperformance elements within law, marketing and other related degrees where marks are given for time and location-specific individual and/or collective outputs. Additionally there are often requirements to assess live performance on professional courses. Regardless of context, live performance is essentially ephemeral and as such can be one of the hardest areas to assess fairly. There are always going to be debates regarding the relative importance of objectivity and subjectivity, of accurate interpretation over creativity and of product versus process in the assessment of live performance. Ensuring reliability of assessment is particularly problematic in assessing live performance as by nature no two performances will be the same. Even in the assessment of a single performance, critics frequently disagree.
