Abstract
Until quite recently, student assessment in universities has widely been seen as an area that, from the standpoint of institutional policy and strategy, lies at the margins rather than at the forefront of senior managers' concerns. To the extent that it has called for a significant senior executive role, that has tended to focus around the custodianship of academic standards, whether through oversight of quality assurance, interchange with external examiners or the chairing of appeals by students against assessment decisions. But a sea-change is now in prospect, since assessment – and the linked (and vexed) issue of feedback to students on their progress and performance – together increasingly pose formidable strategic challenges that cannot easily be sidestepped or ignored.
Fuelling these challenges is an array of factors, including intensified constraints on resources and the prospect of growing calls from higher-fee-paying students for value for money and clearer 'service standards' – in assessment and feedback, as elsewhere; continuing government, employer and student concerns that curriculum and assessment designs should better reflect work and life beyond graduation; and a buoyant stream of technology-led opportunities to recraft assessment and feedback, in tandem with pressures from digitally literate students for much greater scope to communicate their learning via the newer media.