University student anonymity in the summative assessment of written work

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the issue of student anonymity in the summative assessment of student work in higher education. It considers both theoretical literature pertaining to bias in the evaluation of the work of others and the limited empirical work undertaken on this issue in higher education. It then describes the experience of three higher education institutions in their institutional consideration of student anonymity in assessment. It concludes with an attempt to integrate three perspectives from teaching and learning theory into the anonymity debate, which has largely been conceived in terms of institutional policy, and suggests that there is scope for much further teaching and learning research in the area.

Keywords:

• assessment
• anonymity
• bias
• pedagogy

Notes

1. In this paper ‘summative assessment’ means any assessment that generates a mark which directly contributes to a result on a university transcript.

2. Many documents relied on in this section were obtained from the University of Melbourne, which responded favourably to an access request in 2005. These documents can be accessed from the author.

3. The discussion in this section is based largely upon the University of Gloucestershire’s Thematic Review on Anonymous Assessment of Coursework, Final Report, February 2005, URL: http://www.glos.ac.uk/adu/clt/tladocs/index.cfm