Sustainable assessment?: Critical features of the assessment process in a modularised engineering programme

This paper reports a project researching the interplay between a formal assessment system on the one hand and the development of students’ and teachers’ work in the actual assessment process on the other. Applying a social practice perspective, empirical data from the first year of an engineering programme mapped the assessment process through documentary studies and qualitative interviews with students and teachers. search reveals the distinction between the social processes involved in the teaching and learning process, on one hand, and the rules and procedures shaping the assessment process on the other. During the course of the first year the two processes continuously distinguished themselves from each other, leaving failing students in an individualised situation. Students struggled hard to manage all the assignments encountered, narrowing their focus on most immediate events that lay ahead. This approach often eventually failed and so students dropped chosen parts of the assessment system in order to manage the situation. Teachers’ aspirations and the intentions underlying the assessment system became thwarted, but both students and teachers placed responsibility for failures on the individual student. The assessment process as an emergent phenomenon thus shows a traditional elite character.