The Problem of Assessment Even directly observed work-place
assessment is not completely valid. The fact of being observed
can make a difference to performance, for example. Anyone whose
teaching has been observed can testify to this—even if you do
nothing differently, the students may be inhibited, or "play
up", or try to be "good". And the further one goes from the
practical situation, the more problematic assessment becomes.
Let us assume that out of a given group of students, it is
possible to tell who is competent in a given area and who is
not. This is an entirely idealistic construction, of course,
because whatever basis we construct for making the judgement, it
will itself be a form of assessment. (Note, too, that
"competence" as used here, is merely a general term covering
knowledge as well as practice, and has no necessary implications
of a competence-based assessment scheme.) In practice, when
setting an examination in a "hard" subject (as opposed to a
"soft" one—the STEM disciplines, for example,