Once staging is teachable, it becomes assessable. The moment genre is organised as a sequence of obligatory stages, assessment is no longer a separate practice layered on top of teaching. It is the natural completion of the same logic.
This post traces how genre-based pedagogy crystallises in assessment rubrics — and how evaluation quietly shifts from interpreting meaning to verifying compliance.
1. From guidance to measurement
Staging initially appears as instructional support: a way of helping learners navigate complex meaning-making tasks. But assessment requires something more rigid.
To be assessable, stages must be:
identifiable,
enumerable,
and reliably recognisable across texts.
What was introduced as a heuristic is formalised as a metric.
2. The birth of the checklist
Assessment rubrics translate stages into criteria.
Each stage becomes:
a box to be ticked,
a requirement to be met,
or a feature to be present.
The rubric does not ask how meanings work. It asks whether the expected components appear.
Meaning is no longer interpreted; it is audited.
3. Why this feels objective
Checklists promise fairness. They offer:
transparency,
consistency,
and defensibility.
Because criteria are explicit, judgement appears neutral. The assessor is no longer deciding; they are simply checking.
But neutrality here is achieved by removing interpretation, not by improving it.
4. The displacement of meaning
As rubrics stabilise, evaluative attention shifts:
from semantic effectiveness,
to structural presence,
from rhetorical judgement,
to procedural completion.
A text can satisfy the rubric while remaining semantically inert. Conversely, a text that does unexpected semiotic work risks penalty for non-compliance.
5. Assessment as retrospective pedagogy
Rubrics do more than evaluate. They teach backwards.
Students learn what counts by seeing what is assessed. Over time, the rubric becomes the genre.
Writing is planned not around meaning-making, but around criterion satisfaction.
6. The new economy of success
Once assessment is checklist-based:
success becomes predictable,
failure becomes diagnosable,
and performance becomes optimisable.
This creates a powerful incentive structure. Students are rewarded not for exploring meaning, but for aligning their texts with assessable features.
7. The erosion of professional judgement
Checklists also reconfigure the assessor’s role.
Teachers are no longer positioned as expert interpreters of meaning. They become:
scorers,
moderators of consistency,
and enforcers of criteria.
Judgement is displaced upward into the rubric itself.
8. Looking ahead
Once assessment operates through checklists, authority must be redistributed.
If criteria decide, then teachers no longer own judgement — and students no longer address an interpreter. They address a system.
The next post traces how this reconfigures teacher authority, shifting it from interpretive expertise to procedural enforcement.
That is where we go next.
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