Patchwork quilt or woven cloth? : The student experience of coping with assessment across disciplines

This paper explores assessment experiences of undergraduates studying across disciplines. Within a participatory research design, students as researchers were involved in data collection and interpretation. The student lens is brought to bear on the experiences of academically successful final-year students and their strategies for negotiating assessment across disciplinary departments. Findings highlight perceptions of invisibility, academic homelessness and disadvantage despite participants’ high academic achievement. These successful students viewed the divergent disciplinary approaches to assessment they encountered as legitimate but felt challenged and disadvantaged by their diversity. Findings are discussed within a framing of assessment practice as socially situated and embedded in the educational values and epistemologies of learning communities, thus problematising development of student assessment literacy across disciplinary communities. The paper concludes that it is neither feasible nor educationally valuable to iron out divergence but more intentional ways of revealing and sharing different epistemological positions in assessment practice could mitigate challenges