What do student experiences of programmatic assessment tell us about scoring programmatic assessment data?

Roberts and colleagues' critical realist analysis of student perspectives on programmatic assessment adds to an important and growing body of research. They find that the requirement to balance “the complex relationship between learner agency, assessment structures and the cultural system” represents a crucial mechanism influencing students' experiences of programmatic assessment. This tripartite distinction is extremely helpful in explaining trends we see in programmatic assessment implementations. Others are better placed to comment on learner agency and culture, but for me, it's the structural system of assessment that is too often lacking in its execution. As well as generating an incredible amount of assessment data from multifarious datapoints, programmatic systems require an incredible amount of structure to make them function well. Although programmatic systems require agile and flexible approaches, the need for a robust assessment architecture remains.