Since I listened to Neil Currant, researcher and educator, talking about his Compassionate Assessment Project, this idea has resonated with me for the past few weeks.

Compassionate Assessment is not just kindness, it is not about lowering the standards or making things easy. It is about being rigorous, being challenging but doing in a way that reduces suffering, trauma and emotional difficulties.

The question about “Why we assess?” is raised two main reasons arise:

• For Credit/To Award: Assessment of learning, Quality Assurance, Reliability, Validity, Standards
• Learning: Assessment for learning, Assessment as learning, feedforward, formative assessment

From my perspective, I also see the parallel with the professional world, where the students will be future professionals and will be assessed on a regular and frequent schedule. As educators we assess the Learning Outcomes and we can see the correlation with industry KPI, and how the grading correlates to the level of KPI achievement. Grading, of course, favours a competitive culture rather than a collaborative one. 

Neil Currant also highlights the importance of what the student learns vs. the race to get the best grade. It appears the previous Pass & Fail approach favoured enjoyment of the learning journey and reduces the pressure/tension associated with the assessment practice and the final grade. 

From my perspective, it is beneficial for the students to get familiar with competitiveness and results achievement as this is the real world of the fashion industry. Even in designer roles they will take a share of responsibility for the sales results too. However, I believe we should assess in a holistic and compassionate manner to stimulate the learning process and not only the final outcome.