Strategy for assessment of equal value: norm-critical approach

Picture: Nina Hemmingsson

A further strategy for inclusive assessment is to take a norm-critical approach, to be aware of exclusionary and privileging norms, and to find other ways of looking at things than the normative one.

For example, a norm-critical approach might mean that you as an examiner review how you read students' texts and assess their performance in terms of background, gender, language use, age, etc. Are there, for example, assessment criteria that tend to favour groups? Is there a norm for content, forms, and possible times? You can provide norm-critical feedback, highlighting seemingly neutral assumptions, or encouraging and assessing analysis from different perspectives more generally.

Another way of working in a norm-conscious way around assessment is to make the assessment anonymous. Support for anonymous exams is being developed at KTH.

In Canvas, it is easy to make the assessment anonymous. Instructions on keeping assessments anonymous.

As you will recall from the module on fair examination, for legal reasons, the examiner must be able to see the name of each student to be marked when the actual decision is taken. In that case, anonymity must be disclosed.

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