I’ve been thinking a lot about flexible assessment.
Not because I have suddenly discovered that students have different needs. We’ve known that for a very long time.
And not because I think assessment should become easier.
Quite the opposite.
What interests me is what happens when we stop thinking about flexibility as something we provide for particular students and start thinking about it as something we build into assessment design from the beginning.
That sounds like a small distinction.
I don’t think it is.
The problem with “flexibility”
One of the things that prompted my thinking was a consultation around assessment.
What became clear was that people did not necessarily mean the same thing when they talked about flexible assessment.
For some, flexibility meant adjustments for individual students.
For others, it meant giving students different ways of completing an assessment.
And for some, there was an understandable concern that too much flexibility might somehow compromise academic standards.
That last concern is worth taking seriously.
If students are demonstrating different things, in different ways, how do we know that they have achieved the same learning outcomes?
But perhaps that is the wrong question.
Perhaps the question is:
How can we design assessment so that students have meaningful ways to demonstrate the same learning?
That feels quite different.
From adjustment to design
There is something uncomfortable about a system in which the “standard” assessment is designed first, and then we work out what to do when it doesn’t work for particular students.
A student can’t present to a large group? We make an adjustment.
A student finds a live presentation difficult? We consider an alternative.
A student has circumstances that make the original format difficult? We work out what flexibility might be possible.
The intention is usually good.
But the underlying assumption remains that there is one normal way of demonstrating learning, and everyone else needs an exception.
What if we designed differently?
What if, where the learning outcomes allow it, students could choose from a range of ways of demonstrating their learning as part of the assessment itself?
For example, perhaps a presentation could be delivered to a smaller group, online through Teams, or as a recorded presentation.
The point isn’t that every student should be able to choose absolutely anything.
The point is that the assessment design could anticipate difference rather than waiting for difference to become a problem.
That is where Universal Design thinking becomes particularly interesting to me.
Instead of asking:
“Who needs an adjustment?”
we start asking:
“How could we design this so that more students can access it from the outset?”
But what about standards?
This is probably the bit that makes people nervous.
And I understand why.
Assessment has a job to do. We need to know whether students have achieved the intended learning outcomes. Professional and disciplinary requirements matter. Academic standards matter.
But the format through which someone demonstrates learning isn’t always the same thing as the learning itself.
If the learning outcome is about being able to communicate an argument, for example, does achievement necessarily depend on standing in front of a large room and delivering it live?
Sometimes it might.
Sometimes the presentation itself is the professional skill being assessed.
But sometimes it isn’t.
And that distinction matters.
It asks us to be much more precise about what we are actually assessing.
What the consultation made me think about
The consultation left me with a slightly uncomfortable thought.
Perhaps we have sometimes treated flexibility as a policy problem when it is actually a design problem.
If flexibility depends on everyone understanding the rules, knowing when exceptions apply and being confident about what can and cannot be changed, then we are always going to have variation.
But if flexibility is deliberately built into the assessment design, it becomes much less exceptional.
It becomes part of the way we assess.
That doesn’t mean removing academic challenge.
It might actually mean being clearer about it.
The challenge becomes:
What must the student demonstrate, and what are we assuming they must do in order to demonstrate it?
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
I’m still working this out
I don’t have a neat answer to this yet.
In fact, one of the things I’m noticing as I start thinking more seriously about scholarship is how often the interesting bit comes after you think you’ve solved something.
I started with a practical question about assessment.
I’ve ended up thinking about Universal Design, academic standards, assumptions about the “normal” student, and the difference between designing for inclusion and making individual adjustments.
And now I have more questions.
How much flexibility is genuinely useful?
When does choice become confusing rather than empowering?
Which learning outcomes genuinely require a particular assessment format?
How do students experience having more choice?
And what happens to staff workload when we design assessment this way?
Those seem to me like much more interesting questions than simply asking whether flexible assessment is “good”.
For now, I think I’m persuaded by one idea:
Maybe the most inclusive assessment isn’t the one that offers the most adjustments.
Maybe it is the one that needs fewer adjustments in the first place.
And that feels like something worth exploring.
