Risk and Uncertainty in Assessment: exploring the contribution of economics to identifying and analysing the social dynamic in grading

ABSTRACT

The social processes and political economy of grading in British higher education is a neglected topic. The aim of the paper is to stimulate interest in and empirical work about the secret garden of grading course work. In particular, the paper focuses on the contribution which the economics of uncertainty, as a conceptual framework, might make to revealing significant aspects of the real world of grading students’ coursework. Uncertainty, it is argued, is a powerful organising concept because it reveals the weight of obligation which academics may feel which pushes them towards awarding an appropriate grade in the context of public scrutiny of their grading and the anxious anticipation of possibly litigatious students hoping for the highest grade they can tweak out of the system. The paper is tentative and speculative yet the preliminary argument offered suggests that empirical work may now be appropriate.

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Notes on contributors

Garth Allen

GARTH ALLEN is Head of the Department of Social Sciences at the University College of St Mark and St John. His main academic activities arise from the wish to promote the democratisation of really useful knowledge