The Moral Contours of Assessment

These two paradoxes, profound and central as they are, do not exhaust the moral contours of assessment procedures. Assessment—any form of assessment—is moral in a number of ways. First and foremost, assessment is moral because, as I mentioned earlier, it quite literally places a value on each individual student. This value is usually given either as a percentage or some other fraction, a score, or a letter grade. In the colossal majority of cases, the student falls short of mathematical “perfection.” Assessment is also moral in that most forms of assessment in some way measure one student against another—that is, they assign not just an absolute value but also a relative value. Here issues of justice creep in: There is a delicate balance between treating everyone equally and rewarding those who do better, whether through hard work, innate ability, or a combination of these (an important issue to which I return a bit later). Furthermore, assessment is moral because it often has serious real-world consequences for learners. The grades we give our students, and the scores they obtain on standardized tests, often have huge significance in their lives: Because of these scores and grades, they get or do not get accepted into programs, they are or are not given scholarships and funds, they are or are not promoted, are or are not given a raise, and so on. (Remember the consequences faced by Peter’s Palestinian student in the story told at the beginning of chap. 1.) Our decisions form the direct or indirect sources of these assessments and thus carry great moral weight, because we have to be sure (as in fact we rarely can be) that the aforementioned kinds of decisions are just and fair, that the “best” candidates (once again a moral expression) have in fact been successful. Last, assessment is also moral because, like everything else in teaching, it is conducted in complex and morally ambiguous real-world contexts, and to be understood properly it cannot be divorced from those contexts or seen to be merely about the learning of languages. The dilemma faced by Peter in chapter 1 is an example of the way in which the world beyond the language classroom can impinge hugely on our decision making in 63 Values in English Language Teaching student evaluation: Here, the political realities of life outside class made an apparently straightforward evaluation of the student’s abilities horribly complex in moral terms. The decision that Peter made had, of course, no impact on that student’s knowledge of English. My point is precisely that sometimes, whether we like it or not, a student’s abilities are not the only thing that needs to be taken into consideration. Let me share an example parallel with that of Peter. A friend of mine, Alison, recently took a junior faculty position in the French department of a well-known private university. She had a student who wished to take a minor in French; to do so, he needed a B minimum in his language classes. Yet the student was lazy and rather arrogant and signally failed to do work at a level that would allow him to receive a B.Alison gave him a lower grade. She was called to the dean, who quietly explained to Alison that this student’s parents had donated millions of dollars to the university and that the university was counting on further donations. Like Peter, Alison reluctantly changed the grade she had awarded. I tell this story not to condemn Alison, but quite the opposite—to show how complicated the real world of evaluating students can be. As with Peter, the final grade Alison gave did not in the least represent some reassessment of the student but was a result of external factors; nevertheless, the final grade is what counts in the real world.1 Neither do the moral contours of evaluation end here. An additional moral dilemma is the constant and unresolved (indeed, unresolvable) dynamic between formative and summative functions of assessment. Assessment specialists commonly draw a distinction between formative assessment—that is, assessment designed to indicate to a student how he or she is doing—with summative assessment, which measures final achievement in a course or program (Rea-Dickins & Gardner, 2000; Torrance & Pryor, 1998). Yet in reality the distinction is not clear. Certain summative forms of evaluation take on a formative role: For example, when I received what is known as an Upper Second bachelor’s degree from my university in England—a summative qualification—I also took this as a formative indication that, without a first-class degree, I had no business returning to postgraduate education. It took me some time to revise my interpretation and enter a doctoral program. Conversely—and, I believe, more commonly—grades or marks that are meant to have a formative role take on certain summative qualities. For example, many kinds of evaluation, such as quizzes and midterms, are intended to let students know how they are doing. Yet often scores from these sources also factor into final grades; thus, the evaluation is also summative in that it forms part of the summative grade. Moreover, even when this is not the case, formative evaluations look like summative ones; they often come in the form of scores on tests in which there is little in the way of feedback. I suggest that this resemblance leads learners to see the teacher as a judge rather than as a teacher, once again affecting the teacher-student relation. 1Julian Edge has pointed out to me that there are other moral aspects to this story, too. The parents’ desire to look after their son’s interests is also morally justifiable, as are the potential benefits from the expected donations to many other students at the university, including some whom scholarship money would allow to participate in otherwise prohibitively expensive programs. The Morality of Testing and Assessment 64 Last, the truly dilemmatic nature of approaches to assessment is underscored by the fact that, in light of the paradox of the necessary evil, a decision not to use any form of assessment at all is also a moral act. By choosing not to give any exams or other methods of assessment, a teacher is of course relieving students of the stress and all the attendant vagaries of determining what counts as knowledge. However, such a teacher is also sending other moral messages to her students. Many students might believe that this decision reflects an underlying indifference to what the students learn and hence to them as people; that is, once again it will affect the teacher-student relation. Students who would normally strive to excel will have a reduced motivation to do so—in fact, only those students truly engaged in the subject matter are likely to remain unaffected and, as most teachers would agree, such students are rarely in the majority (Milton, Pollio, & Eison, 1986). Furthermore, regardless of the theoretical arguments, exams can function to help students distinguish important from less important aspects of what they cover; the absence of exams makes such distinctions much harder. In many ways, then, the moral landscape of assessment is complex and difficult terrain. Both the inner workings of assessment procedures and their broader sociopolitical context are such that questions of assessment are always also questions of values. These values, in turn, are never straightforward but always fraught with conflict.