Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil · September 2026
Assessment should do more than judge performance. It should enable people to understand what is expected, recognise how they can improve, and participate meaningfully in the processes through which their knowledge and professional competence are recognised. This article argues that genuinely educational assessment depends upon three interconnected principles: inclusion, transparency and empowerment.
For much of my professional life, I have been the person designing learning, assessing performance and providing feedback to others.
By the time I applied for Senior Fellowship, I had accumulated decades of experience as an educator and had worked as a teacher, lecturer, coach, assessor and inspector. At Aston University, my professional practice included coaching Senior Leader apprentices, designing learning resources, running Best Practice sessions for colleagues, developing assessment rubrics and advocating approaches to feedback intended to help learners understand how to improve.
My SFHEA application itself contained an example of precisely this philosophy. Describing my work with Senior Leader apprentices, I explained that I had created and shared clear assessment rubrics so that learners could understand the criteria against which their work would be judged. I argued that when feedback is aligned with those rubrics, learners are better able to understand what they need to do to improve. I also described sharing examples of feedback with colleagues and emphasising the importance of giving learners specific action points for improvement.
Then I became the assessed.
My attempts to achieve SFHEA recognition placed me on the receiving end of an assessment and feedback system. The experience caused me to reconsider a question I thought I understood well:
What makes feedback following an assessment useful?
I came to realise that feedback can be reasonable and meaningful from the perspective of an assessor and yet remain difficult for its recipient to implement.
That distinction matters.
This article is therefore not principally about whether I should or should not have been awarded Senior Fellowship. Nor can my individual experience establish that the assessment process as a whole was unfair or that individual assessors acted improperly.
Instead, I use autoethnography to examine the interaction between an assessment system and the person attempting to navigate it.
Autoethnography is particularly suited to this purpose because it enables personal experience to be examined as culturally and institutionally situated rather than treated simply as private biography. My documentary record—including applications, panel feedback, successful exemplars supplied to applicants and my subsequent challenges to the assessment—provides the empirical material through which I interrogate the experience.
The resulting story raises questions extending beyond SFHEA recognition. They concern assessment literacy, transparency, inclusion, feedback, professional judgement, epistemic justice and the responsibility of educators to design assessment systems that enable recipients to move from:
“not yet” to “I understand what I now need to demonstrate.”
There is, however, another dimension to this autoethnography that is essential to understanding why I did not experience the process simply as an unsuccessful assessment that I needed to learn how to navigate more effectively.
As an experienced educator, assessor and advocate of inclusive practice, I increasingly believed that I could see problems in the assessment design itself. At that point, my position changed. The question was no longer only:
“What do I need to do to obtain Senior Fellowship?”
A more ethically significant question emerged:
“If I believe aspects of this process are inherently unfair, what responsibility do I have to challenge them rather than simply learning how to comply with them successfully?”
This created a tension between personal advancement and professional responsibility.
I might have continued modifying my application until I discovered the particular form of evidence and writing that would satisfy the assessment process. Achieving SFHEA would undoubtedly have been personally valuable. But simply adapting myself to the system would not necessarily have addressed the concerns I had identified for those who came after me.
My experience as an educator had taught me that assessment design should not depend excessively upon a learner’s capacity to decipher tacit expectations. I therefore came to see raising concerns about the process not as a distraction from my pursuit of professional recognition, but as part of my responsibility as an educator committed to fairness, inclusion and educational improvement.
This distinction is central to the article.
My story is therefore not only about a candidate seeking to understand assessment feedback. It is also about what happens when a candidate begins to question the fairness of the assessment architecture itself and chooses to make that concern visible.
There is also an important material dimension. Senior Fellowship was not simply a symbolic award that I happened to want. I had invested several years in building the recent Higher Education experience and evidence that I believed would support my progression towards SFHEA and wider academic advancement. My own rationale for appeal explicitly connected the prolonged process with delayed career progression and questioned the fairness of repeatedly requiring further changes after years spent assembling relevant evidence.
In my later autoethnographic understanding, the unsuccessful SFHEA experience became one element within what I experienced as a wider pattern of cumulative professional disadvantage. That wider trajectory ultimately included much more serious employment consequences, culminating in my summary dismissal. I do not present this article as establishing a simple causal chain between the SFHEA assessment and that dismissal. Rather, I locate the assessment experience within the cumulative professional context through which I subsequently came to understand its significance.
The stakes of assessment were therefore not merely emotional. They were professional, material and cumulative.
My experience can be understood through several interconnected bodies of scholarship: assessment literacy, feedback literacy, constructive alignment, inclusive assessment, double binds and epistemic justice.
Together, these provide a strong basis for examining assessment through three interrelated principles: inclusion, transparency and empowerment.
Assessment criteria do not automatically make assessment transparent. A candidate may possess a list of criteria yet remain uncertain about the standard of performance required to satisfy them.
The literature on assessment literacy is helpful here. Assessment literacy involves understanding assessment processes, standards and the characteristics of quality rather than merely knowing that criteria exist. Price et al. (2012), for example, position assessment literacy as foundational to improving student learning.
This distinction helps explain an important feature of my SFHEA experience.
I knew what the formal criteria were. The difficulty was determining what amount, specificity and form of evidence constituted sufficient demonstration of particular criteria.
Being told that there was “scope for more detail” or that evidence needed “more direct illustration” identified a perceived deficiency, but did not necessarily communicate the threshold separating an unsuccessful demonstration from a successful one.
This distinction between knowing the criterion and understanding what sufficient performance looks like is central to transparency in assessment.
It also explains why exemplars matter.
Exemplars can help make tacit standards visible by demonstrating how abstract criteria are instantiated in successful work. Their developmental value, however, depends upon candidates being able to understand what features of the exemplar caused it to cross the required threshold.
A closely related literature has reconceptualised feedback as more than information transmitted from assessor to learner.
Carless and Boud (2018) conceptualise feedback literacy as the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies. Their framework emphasises appreciating feedback, making judgements, managing affect and taking action.
This formulation has an important implication.
Feedback achieves its educational purpose not simply when it has been given, but when it can contribute to productive learner action.
This challenges the assumption that providing feedback is itself sufficient. A learner may receive extensive feedback and still be unable to determine what to do next.
From this perspective, the relevant question is not merely:
Was feedback provided?
It is also:
Could the recipient translate that feedback into actions reasonably likely to improve the next submission?
My experience made this distinction particularly striking because one of the areas I was attempting to evidence for SFHEA—A3—concerned assessing and giving feedback to learners.
In my application, I described using clear rubrics and feedback containing specific action points so that learners could understand how to improve their work.
The assessment experience consequently prompted me to examine the difference between feedback that identifies a weakness and feedback that empowers the recipient to address it.
Constructive alignment, associated particularly with Biggs (1996), provides another important lens. It emphasises coherence between intended learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and assessment.
Applied to professional recognition, this principle can be extended across several elements:
task → criteria → guidance → exemplars → assessor interpretation → feedback
If these elements communicate different implicit messages about what constitutes sufficient evidence, candidates may struggle even when each component appears reasonable when considered separately.
My experience therefore suggests that transparency requires more than published criteria.
It requires coherence of interpretation.
If a task encourages reflective case studies but assessment requires highly explicit criterion-by-criterion evidence, this relationship needs to be made clear.
If successful exemplars are supplied, candidates need to understand which characteristics demonstrate the required standard.
If additional detail is requested, that requirement needs to remain practically compatible with the permitted word count.
Constructive alignment should consequently operate across the entire communicative architecture through which candidates encounter an assessment.
Contemporary scholarship has increasingly challenged the assumption that inclusion is achieved simply by providing accommodations within otherwise unchanged assessment structures.
Nieminen’s (2024) work on inclusive assessment draws attention to agency, participation and belonging. Inclusive assessment, viewed in this way, is not merely concerned with allowing diverse candidates to access assessment; it asks how assessment itself may advantage some ways of communicating knowledge over others.
This distinction is important.
Every candidate may receive the same criteria. Every candidate may receive the same word limit. Every candidate may complete the same form. Yet candidates may not possess equal familiarity with the tacit conventions through which those criteria are interpreted.
An inclusive assessment system therefore needs to consider not simply whether candidates encounter identical rules but whether legitimate differences in professional background, disciplinary tradition, reflective practice and ways of representing knowledge can be recognised within the assessment architecture.
This does not require standards to be lowered.
On the contrary, greater transparency may strengthen rigour because candidates can be assessed more directly on the competence being claimed rather than on their ability to infer hidden conventions.
The concept of the double bind offers another interpretive lens, although I use the term cautiously rather than claiming that every competing assessment requirement constitutes a formal psychological double bind.
In the context of this article, it describes situations in which individually reasonable requirements interact in ways that make satisfying one requirement potentially more difficult without compromising another.
The most obvious example in my experience was:
provide more examples, more detail and more explicit reflection
alongside:
remain within the prescribed word limit.
Neither requirement is unreasonable. Concise professional writing necessarily requires selection.
The difficulty arises when feedback does not also provide sufficient information to determine what existing material has lower assessment value and can safely be removed, what needs to be added, and what amount of new evidence is likely to be sufficient.
Other tensions may operate similarly:
The important design question is therefore not whether competing requirements exist. Complex assessment will inevitably contain tensions.
The question is whether candidates receive sufficient information to negotiate those tensions confidently and productively.
Epistemic justice provides a particularly important lens. Fricker’s (2007) foundational account concerns injustice experienced by people specifically in their capacity as knowers.
This concept has subsequently been applied to education and assessment, including questions about whose knowledge is recognised and which ways of demonstrating knowledge are privileged.
This provides a useful way of interrogating my experience without presuming discriminatory intent.
Assessment necessarily involves epistemic authority.
Assessors determine which evidence is relevant, what counts as sufficient demonstration, which forms of professional knowledge are recognisable within a framework, and whether the candidate crosses the required threshold.
That authority is legitimate. But it is not inconsequential.
In my own application, I used autoethnography, systems thinking, professional testimony, reflective narrative, evidence of learner outcomes and examples of influence on colleagues.
The epistemic question therefore becomes not simply:
Does this candidate possess knowledge and expertise?
but also:
Can this assessment architecture recognise the ways in which that knowledge and expertise are represented?
This distinction becomes especially important where professional recognition may influence career progression.
An epistemically just assessment system should therefore remain alert to the possibility that what appears to be a deficit in professional competence may sometimes involve difficulty translating professional knowledge into the particular representational form recognised by the assessment.
The literature discussed above points towards three closely connected design principles.
Inclusion
Assessment should allow candidates from different professional, disciplinary and epistemological backgrounds a fair opportunity to demonstrate competence.
This does not mean that all forms of evidence must be accepted uncritically. It means that the assessment system should avoid unnecessarily privileging familiarity with tacit conventions over substantive professional competence.
Transparency
Candidates should be able to understand:
Transparency is therefore more than publication of criteria. It concerns the coherence and clarity of the entire assessment process.
Empowerment
Feedback should enable the recipient to act.
An unsuccessful candidate should leave the process with a clearer understanding of:
Empowerment does not mean guaranteeing success. It means preserving the candidate’s agency within the process.
These three principles are interdependent.
Without transparency, inclusion can become procedural rather than substantive. Without inclusion, apparently transparent systems may still favour those most familiar with their conventions. Without empowerment, feedback risks becoming judgement without development.
My first SFHEA application was considered in March 2023.
The documentary evidence presents a nuanced picture.
The panel identified considerable strengths. My Professional Values were considered successfully demonstrated and described as coming through “extremely strongly”. The application was considered “very scholarly and research informed”. The panel also concluded that I had demonstrated the Senior Fellowship requirement relating to coordination, support, supervision, management and/or mentoring of others.
The overall feedback described my submission as “a rich, candid, and deeply personal account” highlighting significant work, professional experience and commitment to professional values.
Nevertheless, further work was required.
A1, A2 and A3 and K3–K6 were identified as requiring further development.
The language of the feedback became significant to my subsequent experience. There was “scope for more detail”; “more concrete ‘for example’ insights” were requested; examples needed to be “unpacked more fully”; and additional contextual detail was recommended.
The panel reassured me that although this might appear to represent many points, much of the revision should require only a small amount of editorial work and additional examples.
From an assessor’s perspective, this was developmental feedback.
From my perspective as its recipient, the challenge became translating my skills and evidence into a revised submission
I attempted to do precisely what I understood the feedback to require.
For my revised application, I explicitly identified the criteria that had previously been considered insufficient and supplied additional evidence.
I included examples concerning the design of learning activities, teaching and learner support, assessment and feedback, how students learn, learning technologies, evaluation of teaching, and quality assurance and enhancement.
I highlighted new material so that assessors could readily identify my revisions.
For A3—assessing and giving feedback to learners—I explained my practice of creating clear rubrics, aligning feedback with criteria and sharing feedback practices with colleagues.
I included an example of feedback given to Senior Leader apprentices and explained my belief that useful feedback should contain specific actions enabling learners to improve their work.
This was not incidental to my application.
It represented a fundamental feature of my educational philosophy:
feedback should empower the recipient to act in the direction of a successful outcome.
My revised application also documented Best Practice sessions through which I shared assessment approaches with colleagues and attempted to improve consistency, fairness and learner outcomes.
The second SFHEA assessment recognised substantial progress.
A1, which had previously required further work, was now judged successfully demonstrated. K3 was also marked as successfully addressed. My Professional Values, scholarship, continuing professional development and influence on colleagues continued to be recognised.
But A2, A3, K4, K5 and K6 still required further development.
For A2, reflection on “specific examples of teaching practice” was requested.
For A3, the panel acknowledged that I had added screenshots of feedback and discussion of feedback practice but sought “more direct illustration” of approaches to assessment and feedback with students.
K4 required more explicit engagement with the use and value of learning technologies, while K6 required clearer articulation of quality assurance and enhancement in relation to my practice.
The feedback was not devoid of specificity. It identified areas in which my evidence was not sufficiently explicit from the panel’s perspective.
Nevertheless, from my position as candidate, a further question arose:
How much more was enough?
That is a deceptively important assessment question.
“Provide more detail” tells a learner the direction of travel. It does not necessarily reveal the threshold.
How many examples?
How detailed should they be?
What dimensions must each example demonstrate?
What distinguishes an example that remains insufficiently direct from one that crosses the threshold?
And how can a candidate determine, before submitting again, that the revised evidence is now likely to be sufficient?
These questions reveal the distinction between feedback as commentary and feedback as empowerment.
The former communicates an assessor’s judgement.
The latter enables the recipient to make an informed change.
My application had originally been considerably longer. I reduced it to comply with the specified limit and subsequently used a revised word count of 5,944 words. I also attempted to use screenshots to provide evidence economically.
The subsequent panel feedback clarified that figures and images formed part of the overall word count and advised further editorial review.
At the same time, I was being asked to provide more concrete examples, more direct illustration, more detailed reflection and more explicit discussion of several criteria.
The panel also clarified that flexibility existed up to 10% above the 6,000-word limit, allowing a maximum below 6,600 words.
These requirements were not logically irreconcilable. Material could be removed from one part of the application and replaced by material judged more relevant elsewhere.
Yet from my perspective they created a practical tension:
“Add more.”
while simultaneously:
“Do not exceed the available space.”
The problem was not simply the existence of a word limit. It was determining what could safely be removed without weakening aspects of the application that had already been recognised as strengths, while predicting what amount and form of new material would satisfy the outstanding criteria.
This raises a question of transparency.
To edit effectively under constraint, the candidate needs to understand not merely that “more” is required, but what evidence carries the greatest assessment value.
Without that information, revision partly becomes an exercise in predicting assessor expectations.
Formal criteria describe what candidates are required to demonstrate. But assessment systems may also contain a hidden curriculum of conventions more readily understood by people already familiar with a particular assessment culture.
My application used an autoethnographic and systems-thinking approach. I attempted to integrate professional practice, scholarship, personal history, values and reflection rather than treating them as disconnected categories. My 7D Thinking framework was explicitly designed to synthesise multiple perspectives.
The panel recognised this distinctiveness. In the second feedback, my model of reflection was described as distinctive and indicative of a highly conscientious approach, while I was simultaneously advised to ensure that my account aligned fully with the individual elements of Descriptor 3.
This exposes another important tension:
How should holistic professional reflection be reconciled with explicit criterion mapping?
If an assessment invites reflective case studies, candidates may reasonably understand evidence as emerging through an integrated narrative.
If assessors require each criterion to be explicitly signposted and independently evidenced, the resulting writing task may operate rather differently.
Neither approach is inherently wrong.
The assessment-design problem arises when the relative priority between them is insufficiently transparent to the candidate.
My uncertainty increased when I compared my evidence for A3 with three successful exemplars supplied through the scheme.
The examples demonstrated considerable variation.
One successful exemplar described developing marking grids and standardising feedback. Another discussed several assessment methods and interactive quizzes providing immediate feedback. A third discussed moderation, external examining and improving dissertation marking and feedback processes.
My own A3 submission described creating rubrics to improve fairness, providing feedback to Senior Leader apprentices, sharing feedback practices with colleagues and emphasising specific actions through which learners could improve their work.
I subsequently challenged the decision and asked what benchmark determined sufficiency for A3 and why evidence that appeared to me to be comparable with the supplied successful examples had not satisfied the criterion in my application.
This comparison does not establish inconsistent assessment. Applications may be assessed holistically, and extracts viewed in isolation cannot demonstrate everything that contributed to the judgement of a complete application.
That limitation needs to be explicit.
Nevertheless, from a candidate’s perspective, the comparison raised an important question about transparency:
What is the purpose of an exemplar?
If exemplars are provided to communicate successful performance, candidates should be able to use them as meaningful calibration devices.
If seemingly comparable evidence can produce different outcomes because of contextual, holistic or qualitative distinctions, those distinctions themselves need to be made visible.
Otherwise an exemplar can paradoxically increase uncertainty.
The candidate studies successful examples, attempts to calibrate their own evidence against them, and then discovers that apparently comparable evidence has not crossed the threshold.
The educational question is consequently not simply whether assessors exercised legitimate professional judgement.
It is whether the relationship between criteria, exemplars and professional judgement is sufficiently transparent to candidates.
A conventional conception of assessment fairness emphasises consistency. There is considerable value in this. But inclusive assessment requires a more sophisticated question.
These conditions do not necessarily guarantee that expectations are equally clear or equally easy to navigate.
Candidates enter professional-recognition processes with different disciplinary histories, professional trajectories, writing traditions and familiarity with institutional conventions.
The question for inclusive assessment is therefore:
Can candidates from different professional and epistemological backgrounds understand what the assessment requires them to demonstrate and how their professional knowledge can be made recognisable within it?
In my case, the documentary record demonstrates substantial professional practice that the panels themselves positively recognised.
The first panel identified strong Professional Values, scholarship and influence. The second continued to recognise expertise, standing and wider influence while identifying particular areas that remained insufficiently articulated.
This creates an important distinction:
Possessing professional competence and successfully representing that competence within an assessment architecture are related, but they are not identical.
Inclusive assessment design should seek to minimise unnecessary distance between them.
My experience has strengthened rather than weakened my belief in rigorous assessment.
Professional recognition should not be awarded simply because someone is experienced, highly qualified or personally convinced of their competence.
Evidence must be evaluated. Standards must mean something.
But rigour and transparency are not opposites.
Transparent assessment may strengthen rigour because candidates understand what must be demonstrated and assessors can justify decisions against shared standards.
I therefore propose a simple test of developmental feedback:
After reading the feedback, can the recipient identify the changes required, make those changes, and explain why those changes should improve their demonstration of the criterion?
If the answer is no, the feedback may not yet be sufficiently empowering.
Statements such as:
may accurately describe an assessor’s judgement.
But they do not necessarily reveal what sufficient performance looks like.
The missing element is often the threshold.
This suggests a shift from feedback towards feedforward.
Instead of saying only:
“Provide more direct illustration of assessment and feedback with students,”
a more actionable formulation might state:
Provide two recent examples in which you personally assessed student work or performance and gave feedback. For each, identify the context, assessment method, feedback approach, resulting learner action or outcome, your reflection on effectiveness, and any influence your practice subsequently had on colleagues or wider provision.
Similarly, instead of:
“More detail is required about learning technologies,”
guidance might specify:
Identify one or two learning technologies you have used directly. Explain why each was selected, how it supported learning, what evidence you used to evaluate its effectiveness, what you learned and how the experience subsequently influenced practice.
The difference is important.
The first formulation requires the candidate to infer much of the expected structure. The second provides an architecture for action.
It does not lower the standard.
It makes the nature of the expected demonstration more transparent.
And by making expectations more transparent, it empowers the candidate to respond.
Assessment designers should therefore actively examine interactions between requirements.
Candidates should not unnecessarily be left to reconcile tensions such as:
These tensions are not inherently inappropriate. Sophisticated academic and professional writing necessarily involves synthesis, prioritisation and judgement.
But when successful performance depends upon resolving competing expectations, the basis for prioritisation should be made as visible as reasonably possible.
If explicit criterion coverage takes priority over autobiographical context, candidates should know this.
If two highly developed examples are preferable to six brief examples, this should be communicated.
If images count towards a word limit, the method for incorporating them should be clear.
If assessors expect examples to contain context, action, rationale, evidence of impact, reflection and influence on others, that architecture can be made explicit without prescribing the substantive content of the candidate’s response.
The candidate’s intellectual effort should be concentrated on demonstrating professional learning rather than reverse-engineering the assessment system.
My experience as both assessor and assessed leads me to propose seven design principles.
1. Make success visible
Criteria should communicate not merely the area to be addressed but, as far as reasonably possible, the quality, depth and type of evidence required.
2. Align task, criteria, exemplars and feedback
Candidates should encounter a coherent conception of quality across the assessment process.
3. Make feedback actionable
Feedback should help recipients identify specific changes rather than merely communicating insufficiency.
4. Make competing demands negotiable
Where tensions are unavoidable—for example between evidential richness and word limits—candidates should understand how priorities should be balanced.
5. Distinguish competence from its representation
Assessment should minimise the possibility that relevant professional competence remains unrecognised primarily because the candidate has not inferred the preferred representational form.
6. Use exemplars as genuine calibration tools
Successful examples should help candidates understand thresholds. Where multiple forms of evidence can satisfy a criterion, the nature of that variation should be explained.
7. Treat repeated misunderstanding as information about the system as well as the candidate
When candidates conscientiously attempt to act upon feedback but continue to misunderstand what is required, assessment designers should ask not only what remains deficient in the submission but whether any aspect of the criteria, exemplars, guidance or feedback remains unnecessarily difficult to interpret.
One of the professional practices I was attempting to demonstrate for Senior Fellowship was my ability to assess and give feedback to learners.
In my application, I argued for clear rubrics, alignment between assessment criteria and feedback, and specific action points that enable learners to improve. I described sharing these approaches with colleagues precisely because I believed assessment should empower learners rather than leave them attempting to guess what assessors expected.
I subsequently found myself on the receiving end of an assessment process that caused me to question those very principles.
Initially, my response was conventional.
I tried to improve my submission. I added evidence. I made criteria more explicit. I incorporated examples. I studied the feedback. I examined successful exemplars. I attempted to understand what the assessors required.
But eventually another question emerged:
At what point does continuing to accommodate an assessment system become less important than challenging what one believes to be unfair within that system?
This became an ethical issue for me.
As an experienced educator, assessor and advocate of equality and inclusion, I did not feel able to treat the process solely as a puzzle that I needed to solve for my own benefit.
If I simply discovered how to construct an application that satisfied the panel, I might eventually achieve the professional recognition I wanted.
But the underlying assessment practices I had begun to question would remain unchanged.
The next candidate could encounter exactly the same uncertainty.
For me, therefore, the decision to challenge aspects of the assessment process represented a shift from individual compliance to professional advocacy.
This distinction matters because resistance to an assessment process can easily be interpreted as unwillingness to accept feedback.
That was not how I experienced my position.
I had spent much of my professional life giving feedback, receiving feedback, assessing others and being assessed myself. My concern was not that professional judgement existed or that my work had been criticised.
My concern was that I could not reconcile aspects of the judgement with principles of assessment that I regarded as fundamental: transparency, alignment, actionable feedback and consistency of standards.
My subsequent comparison of my A3 evidence with successful exemplars was part of this attempt to examine the process rather than simply defend myself. The exemplars contained quite different ways of demonstrating assessment and feedback practice, while my own submission included rubrics, direct feedback and work to influence colleagues. I therefore formally asked what benchmark determined sufficiency and why evidence that appeared comparable to me had produced a different outcome.
This does not, by itself, prove that the assessment decision was objectively unfair. But it explains why simply making further alterations to my application ceased to feel like an adequate response.
From my perspective, I had encountered a professional responsibility to ask whether the system itself could be improved.
That introduces an important dimension to inclusive assessment design.
Empowerment should not be understood merely as empowering candidates to comply successfully with assessment requirements.
Genuine empowerment must also leave space for candidates to question those requirements, expose potential contradictions and contribute to improving the system through which they are being judged.
Otherwise, inclusion risks becoming conditional upon successful adaptation to existing norms.
There is therefore a difference between helping someone to navigate a system and enabling them to participate critically in improving it.
For me, the latter became increasingly important.
Assessment is not merely technical.
Assessors determine what counts as evidence, what constitutes sufficient evidence, how criteria are interpreted and whether a candidate crosses a threshold.
This is a legitimate exercise of professional judgement.
But because assessment involves epistemic power, it carries a corresponding responsibility for transparency.
This becomes especially important in processes connected with professional recognition and career progression.
An unsuccessful outcome is not simply a disappointing grade. It may influence confidence, professional identity and access to subsequent opportunities.
In my rationale for appeal, I expressed concerns about clarity of process design, alignment between tasks, criteria and feedback, transparency and accountability.
What assessment systems can do is discipline professional judgement through transparent design, moderation and explanation.
Transparency does not remove professional judgement. It makes professional judgement more accountable.
Inclusion should not be located solely within the individual candidate.
Candidates can certainly develop greater assessment literacy. They can learn to interpret feedback, seek mentoring, study exemplars and become more familiar with the discourse of an assessment community.
But inclusion is also a property of the system.
It emerges through interaction between:
task design → criteria → guidance → exemplars → constraints → assessor interpretation → feedback → candidate action → reassessment
A weakness in one part may create barriers elsewhere.
Clear criteria may remain difficult to operationalise if thresholds remain tacit.
Exemplars may lose their calibrating function if candidates cannot determine what makes them successful.
Actionable feedback may be difficult to implement if the additional evidence requested cannot readily be accommodated within assessment constraints.
A holistic reflective task may become difficult to navigate if candidates subsequently discover that success depends upon highly explicit atomised mapping.
Inclusive assessment therefore cannot be achieved simply by rewriting a rubric.
It requires systemic alignment between what is asked, what is valued, how it is judged and how candidates are supported to respond.
I am not arguing that professional assessment should become an algorithm in which candidates insert prescribed evidence and automatically receive recognition.
Senior Fellowship appropriately involves professional judgement. Complex professional practice cannot always be reduced to binary indicators.
Transparency therefore does not mean complete predictability.
Nor does it mean telling candidates exactly what to write.
Instead, it asks whether candidates have sufficient information to exercise meaningful agency within the process.
There will always be uncertainty at the boundary of professional judgement.
The purpose of good assessment design should be to ensure that uncertainty arises principally from the legitimate complexity of judging professional competence rather than from avoidable ambiguity within the assessment process.
When a candidate is unsuccessful once, it may reasonably indicate that the required standard has not yet been demonstrated.
When feedback is provided and the candidate revises their work, however, subsequent performance generates additional information.
Where a candidate repeatedly attempts to act upon feedback yet continues to misunderstand what constitutes sufficient evidence, two possibilities should remain open:
the candidate may still not have adequately demonstrated the required competence;
and
the assessment system may not yet have communicated the required demonstration with sufficient clarity.
These explanations are not mutually exclusive.
Recognising the second possibility does not undermine standards. It creates an opportunity for quality enhancement.
Patterns of misunderstanding may reveal criteria that need clarification, exemplars that do not adequately calibrate expectations, feedback dependent upon tacit assumptions or constraints that inadvertently make successful action more difficult.
Failure can therefore become feedback to the assessment system itself.
Autoethnography allows personal experience to become a site of inquiry rather than merely a story about the self.
My SFHEA experience undoubtedly generated frustration and professional detriment. But if the analysis stopped with frustration, its educational value would be limited.
The more productive question is:
What can this experience teach us?
It has taught me that assessment needs to be designed from the recipient’s perspective as well as the assessor’s.
When designing criteria, we should ask not only:
Can assessors use these criteria to make a judgement?
but also:
Can candidates use these criteria to construct an adequate demonstration of their competence?
When writing feedback, we should ask not only:
Have I explained why this does not yet meet the standard?
but also:
Have I enabled this person to understand what meeting the standard would look like?
And when candidates repeatedly struggle, we should ask not only:
Why have they still not demonstrated the criterion?
but also:
What might their difficulty tell us about the inclusiveness, transparency and developmental value of our assessment system?
These questions move assessment closer to its educational purpose.
It would be misleading to describe the consequences of this experience simply in terms of frustration.
Frustration was present, but the stakes were considerably higher.
Professional recognition in Higher Education is connected with status, credibility, progression and access to future opportunities. For me, Senior Fellowship formed part of a much longer professional aspiration towards academic advancement.
When I joined Aston University, I already held a PhD in Education and had decades of experience in teaching and education. Nevertheless, I subsequently completed a PG Certificate, PG Diploma and M.Ed., with the latter qualifications contributing recent Higher Education evidence that I believed would support my Senior Fellowship application.
In my rationale for appeal, I recorded my concern that this had become a prolonged developmental route. I had spent several years acquiring recent evidence and completing additional qualifications, and I explicitly linked further delays in achieving SFHEA with delay to my wider career progression.
The consequences of an assessment outcome therefore cannot always be understood solely at the level of the individual assessment event.
Assessment decisions may accumulate.
A failure to obtain professional recognition at one point can affect eligibility, confidence, status, visibility or competitiveness at another.
A delayed progression opportunity can interact with later organisational decisions.
A process that appears relatively small when viewed in isolation may look very different when situated within a longer professional trajectory.
This is particularly important to my autoethnographic account because I subsequently came to understand my SFHEA experience as one element within a wider pattern of cumulative disadvantage during my employment.
I use that term deliberately.
The argument is not that the SFHEA decision alone caused every subsequent professional difficulty I experienced. Nor could this article establish such a causal proposition.
Rather, cumulative disadvantage directs attention to the way apparently discrete experiences can interact over time.
In my lived experience, failure to obtain SFHEA did not end when the panel made its decision. It became another professional setback within a longer trajectory in which I experienced barriers to progression, questioned the fairness of institutional processes and ultimately faced much more serious employment consequences, culminating in summary dismissal.
Viewed retrospectively, this changes the significance of the SFHEA episode.
It was not merely:
an unsuccessful application.
It represented:
This broader perspective matters for assessment scholarship.
We often write about feedback as if assessment occurs within a bounded educational moment: a task is submitted, a judgement is made, feedback is given and the learner attempts again.
Professional assessment does not always operate within such contained boundaries.
Its consequences may travel.
They may affect identities, opportunities, institutional relationships and careers.
For this reason, inclusive assessment design should attend not only to the fairness of the immediate decision but also to the material significance of the opportunity being distributed through that decision.
The higher the stakes, the stronger the responsibility for transparency, consistency and actionable feedback.
There is also an important connection with empowerment.
A process cannot reasonably be described as empowering merely because a candidate is permitted to resubmit.
The relevant question is whether the candidate is given a meaningful opportunity to convert effort, evidence and feedback into progression.
Where repeated attempts consume substantial time while the required threshold continues to feel uncertain, the consequences may extend far beyond disappointment.
They may become cumulative.
My experience therefore leads me to argue that assessment should be considered not only as a mechanism for recognising learning, but also as a potential gatekeeper of professional opportunity.
That gatekeeping function places a particularly strong ethical responsibility upon assessment design.
My experience of seeking Senior Fellowship began as a personal attempt to gain professional recognition.
It became something considerably more consequential.
The documentary record presents a complex story. My applications were recognised as demonstrating substantial strengths, while particular criteria continued to require further development. I responded to feedback, added evidence, made my practice more explicit and attempted to align my submission more closely with assessor expectations.
Yet my experience eventually produced two questions rather than one.
The first was:
What do I need to change in order to succeed?
The second became:
What if what needs to change is not only my application, but aspects of the assessment process itself?
That second question changed my relationship with the process.
As an experienced educator, I did not believe my professional responsibility ended with securing an award for myself. Once I had developed substantive concerns about transparency, consistency and the interaction between feedback and assessment constraints, simply complying until I achieved SFHEA would not necessarily have addressed those concerns for anybody else.
This is why empowerment in assessment needs a broader definition.
Empowerment cannot mean merely equipping candidates to become better at satisfying institutional expectations.
It should also mean creating assessment cultures in which candidates can question expectations, challenge potential inconsistencies and contribute legitimate knowledge about how assessment processes are experienced from the recipient’s side.
A genuinely inclusive assessment system should be capable not only of assessing the candidate. It should also be capable of learning from the candidate.
My SFHEA experience was not an isolated episode producing temporary frustration. I had invested years in acquiring qualifications, building recent Higher Education evidence and pursuing recognition that I understood to be relevant to my career progression.
In my own subsequent understanding, the unsuccessful SFHEA experience became part of a wider pattern of cumulative professional disadvantage, a trajectory that ultimately included summary dismissal.
I therefore resist interpreting repeated failure merely as evidence that a candidate needs to try harder, become more assessment-literate or adapt more successfully to institutional expectations.
Sometimes persistence should take the form of revision.
Sometimes it should take the form of challenge.
And sometimes professional responsibility requires us to ask whether an assessment system that repeatedly produces uncertainty for an experienced practitioner might itself benefit from reflection.
This brings me back to the three principles at the centre of this article.
Inclusion requires more than allowing everyone to enter the same assessment process. It requires serious attention to whether different professional trajectories and legitimate ways of knowing can be recognised within it.
Transparency requires more than publishing criteria. It requires sufficient clarity about thresholds, priorities, exemplars and expectations for candidates to understand how judgements are being made.
Empowerment requires more than providing feedback. It means enabling candidates both to act upon assessment and, where necessary, to question the assumptions and structures through which they are being assessed.
These principles become particularly important where assessment acts as a gatekeeper to professional advancement.
I therefore conclude with five questions:
The fifth question is important.
Education should not teach people merely to comply skilfully with existing systems.
At its best, education develops the capacity to recognise when systems can be improved—and the confidence to say so.
My unsuccessful pursuit of Senior Fellowship therefore leaves me with a broader proposition:
Rigorous assessment should make expectations transparent, participation inclusive and feedback sufficiently actionable to empower improvement. But genuinely educational assessment should also be open to learning from those who challenge it.
For candidates, the consequence of an assessment decision may extend far beyond the submission being judged.
For institutions, therefore, fairness in assessment is not simply a question of good pedagogical practice.
It is a question of professional opportunity, institutional responsibility and social justice.
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This article is an autoethnographic reflection on my experience of seeking Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). It draws upon my applications, assessment feedback, successful exemplars provided through the scheme, my subsequent challenges to the assessment process, and my wider professional experience as an educator, assessor and advocate of inclusive practice.
The article does not seek to establish that individual assessors acted improperly or that my experience alone demonstrates systemic unfairness. Rather, I use my experience as a site of inquiry through which to examine broader questions about inclusion, transparency, empowerment, epistemic justice and the consequences of high-stakes professional assessment.
It forms part of my continuing autoethnographic research into professional identity, cumulative disadvantage and the ways institutional systems shape whose knowledge, experience and professional contribution become recognised.
Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil (September 2026)
© 2026 Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil. All rights reserved.
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