RM Compare | ⏱️NOW and Assessment as Learning: Building 'Guild Knowledge'

A couple of weeks ago we launched RM Compare | ⏱️NOW into BETA. This is a fast, login-free way to experience comparative judgement. You can capture or upload an item, make a few quick comparisons against a trusted standard, and get a result in minutes, with no setup required.

That description is accurate, but it undersells what ⏱️NOW is really doing. This post introduces two concepts that sit at the heart of it: Assessment as Learning, and Guild Knowledge.

Three types of assessment

Most people working in education or professional development are familiar with two types of assessment. Assessment of Learning measures what someone knows or can do (the exam at the end of term, the final judgement, the grade). Assessment for Learning uses feedback to help someone improve (the teacher's comments, the formative review, the mid-project critique).

Both are well-established and well-studied. But there is a third type that is less widely discussed, and in many ways more powerful: Assessment as Learning. This happens when the act of assessing itself is the learning. Not "here is feedback to help you improve," but "by actively judging quality, you develop a deeper understanding of what quality is."

This distinction matters because it changes what you are trying to achieve. When ⏱️NOW asks you to estimate quality, make comparisons, and then reveals how accurate your judgement was, it is not primarily functioning as an assessment of your item. It is functioning as an opportunity to develop and test your own sense of quality. The experience is the point.

What is Guild Knowledge — and where does it come from?

The term "Guild Knowledge" has its roots in the medieval craft guilds such as the Worshipful Companies of the City of London and their equivalents across Europe. The Goldsmiths, the Fletchers, the Mercers, the Drapers: these were not just trade associations. They were the primary mechanism by which expertise was preserved and transmitted across generations.

The guild system worked through apprenticeship. A young craftsperson did not learn their trade from a manual or a set of written procedures. They worked alongside a master for years, absorbing not just the techniques but the eye: in other words the ability to look at a piece of work and know instantly whether it met the standard. That intuitive sense of quality could not be written down. It was tacit knowledge, built through repeated exposure to examples across the full quality range, guided by someone who already held it.

Education researcher D. Royce Sadler used exactly this framing when he argued in his landmark 1989 paper that expert teachers carry standards "largely in unarticulated form, inside their heads as tacit knowledge." Where teachers compare and discuss student work, he wrote, this shared understanding "constitutes a form of guild knowledge." The challenge, and the opportunity, is finding ways to develop that guild knowledge in learners, rather than allowing it to accumulate slowly and accidentally over years of experience.

Guild Knowledge is what an experienced teacher has when they glance at a piece of writing and instantly know whether it is strong. It is what allows a senior recruiter to scan a portfolio in seconds and make a reliable judgement. It is what lets a clinical supervisor recognise competent practice at a glance, and spot where a trainee needs support. Novices cannot do this yet not because they lack intelligence, but because they have not yet had enough structured exposure to a range of examples to internalise the standard.

How ⏱️NOW builds Guild Knowledge through Assessment as Learning

When you use RM Compare | ⏱️NOW, you start by capturing or uploading an item and

When you use RM Compare | ⏱️NOW, you begin by estimating the quality of an item before you compare it to anything else. This is a deliberate step. It activates whatever Guild Knowledge you already have to reveal your current sense of where on the quality scale this piece of work sits.

You then work through a small number of comparisons, seeing pairs of items side-by-side and picking the stronger one each time. You are exposed, briefly but directly, to a range of work of different quality. You are doing exactly what Sadler said was necessary: making judgements about a variety of works, with a trusted standard as your reference point.

Then comes the reveal. NOW shows you how accurate your initial estimate was - how closely your instinctive judgement aligned with the standard. This is the Assessment as Learning moment. You are not merely receiving a score. You are seeing whether your Guild Knowledge is calibrated, and if not, in which direction it diverges.

The more you do this, the sharper your judgement becomes. You begin to internalise the patterns that distinguish stronger work from weaker. You develop what we have previously described as "thinking like a connoisseur". In other words a fast, reliable, experience-based ability to recognise quality that eventually operates below the level of conscious deliberation.

Why this matters across sectors

Assessment as Learning and Guild Knowledge are not concepts that belong only in classrooms. They are relevant wherever people need to make consistent, reliable judgements about quality, which is to say, they are relevant to almost every professional context.

The assessor who needs to moderate marking consistently across a large cohort is developing Guild Knowledge. So is the recruiter who needs to evaluate candidates against a shared standard, the content moderator who needs to apply policy consistently across thousands of items, the clinical supervisor who needs to recognise competent performance reliably, and the procurement professional who needs to evaluate tender responses against criteria that are difficult to reduce to a checklist.

In every case, the problem is the same: how do you help someone develop the tacit standards that experienced practitioners already hold, and do it at a pace and scale that organisations actually need? ⏱️NOW gives you a practical, immediate answer. Work against a trusted standard, make a few comparisons, see how accurate your judgement is, and repeat.

The wider RM Compare story

We have been exploring these ideas across several posts on this blog. Our Learning by Evaluating work drew on research by Bartholomew and Mentzer at Purdue University to show how even a brief evaluative exercise leads to measurable improvements in the work students subsequently produce.

⏱️NOW is where those ideas become immediately accessible. It is not a research project or a long-term programme. It is a few minutes of structured judgement practice, available now, with no login required.

In our next post, we will look in detail at the research evidence behind Learning by Evaluating, introducing the studies that explain why this approach works, and what the evidence tells us about how Guild Knowledge develops in practice.

If you want to experience Assessment as Learning and test your Guild Knowledge now, RM Compare | ⏱️NOW is ready.