Blog
Posts for category: Opinion
-
From Disputation to Marks: How the Industrial Revolution Rewired Assessment (Part 1 / 4)
For more than 200 years, formal assessment has been organised around a deceptively simple idea: break performance into parts, assign marks, add them up, and trust the resulting number. Written exams and numerical grading feel so natural that it is hard to imagine assessment working any other way.
-
Why AI Demands a New Architecture for Assessment (4 Part Series)
Generative and agentic AI are exposing the limits of assessment systems built for a more predictable, more mechanical world. In response, much of the assessment sector is treating AI as a way to mark faster, moderate more cheaply, and preserve the familiar exam–mark–grade machinery. This will not end well.
-
A trip to the dentist
This morning I went for a routine dental check‑up. What struck me was how naturally my dentist fell into a comparative frame. He wasn’t mentally ticking boxes on a rubric. He was looking at two artefacts and asking, “Which represents a healthier, more stable situation?”
-
A Famous Exam Story With a Hidden Assessment Problem
The story of the Barometer Question is usually told as a joke at the expense of an inflexible examiner. But if you look at it through an assessment lens, it is really a story about design failure, construct clarity, and the importance of a strong holistic statement of quality.
-
Universal Paperclips
Economist Charles Goodhart warned that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The paperclip AI is that warning turned into a toy: once “number of paperclips” becomes the only thing that counts, every other value is expendable. When I look at how AI is being introduced into education, especially assessment, I sometimes worry we are drifting towards our own paperclip machines.
-
Newsletter April 2026
Welcome to our latest 'bumper' newsletter - there is just so much going on right now! It's hard to think of a time in assessment that has had so much transformation and change taking place. Not only that but the change continues to come from all angles - policy, technological, pedagogical etc etc.
-
Mobley vs Workday – an update on the case that is challenging AI assessment
Derek Mobley, an IT professional who turned to digital hiring platforms after being laid off from his job. Over nine months he submitted well over 100 applications through Workday‑powered portals and, despite being qualified, received no interviews or offers. When he realised that even the rejection emails were being generated by bots, he began to suspect that automated screening, not human judgement, was keeping him out.
-
Back to the Future: Rethinking Assessment in a World of Uncertainty
In 1792, revolutionaries in Paris abolished a king, Americans calmly re‑elected a president, and Cambridge quietly invented something that still shapes millions of lives every year: exam marking. While politics and industry were being rebuilt in public, assessment was being rebuilt on paper. Two centuries later, we are still living inside that decision – and only now starting to see its limits.
-
How reliable are GCSE grades – and what can we do about it?
Every year in England, some things in education feel almost guaranteed. Exam season will arrive on schedule, bringing with it the familiar mix of anxiety, hope and hard work in schools up and down the country. Ofqual will emphasise that our qualifications system is robustly designed, closely regulated and delivering grades that are fair and can be trusted. And Dennis Sherwood will publish fresh analysis arguing – drawing largely on Ofqual’s own technical reports – that neither the level of fairness nor the level of trust we assume is quite what it seems.