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When assessment goes local, who keeps what students bring back?

by Carlene Kyeremeh

A student sent me a photograph of a handwritten waybill. Dated November 2022, it records a unit price for printed sachet film. It also carries the names of a supplier and a customer and the given name of the person who issued it. The waybill appeared in a term paper on fiscal consolidation as evidence of a cost increase that no statistical series I have found records.

It is in my files. Not the department’s. Mine.

I describe the waybill here but do not reproduce it, identify those named, or give the figure it records. The students who wrote the paper agreed to this account. I have no record that the supplier, the customer or the person named agreed to the document’s retention or wider use, so I have minimised the identifying detail, including the price, which is the most commercially sensitive thing on the page.

I have argued elsewhere that the curriculum can help to thicken a thin documentary record. Ask each student to obtain one item of locally sourced evidence: an interview, a quoted price, a document from a firm or public office, and, over successive cohorts, a course can assemble material that no database previously held. This is no longer only my ambition. Programmes are already redesigning assessment in response to generative AI, and one attractive move is to require evidence a model cannot retrieve: a price obtained in a market, an interview conducted locally, a document held by a firm or public office. That redesign brings third-party material into course files at scale, often without a parallel decision about what should happen to it after assessment.

That is the promise. The waybill in my files is the problem that follows it.

What universities already know how to govern

Research ethics and commercial confidentiality are not routinely ignored in student work. Professionally oriented programmes have long had to decide what an organisation may disclose, who may see it and when it must be returned. For example, McMaster University’s course-based research guidance explicitly covers undergraduate, MBA and graduate courses. The University of Toronto provides both a course-based ethics route and a classroom confidentiality agreement for third-party proprietary information. In the UK, the University of Manchester’s ethics guidance asks researchers to establish first whether an activity is research training conducted as coursework, described as collecting and analysing a small amount of data to gain experience in method, or research proper. These arrangements show that collection, consent, confidentiality and use within a defined project can be governed. My argument is therefore not that universities lack such protections. It begins where a normal project would end.

The problem begins when the course ends

If material is returned, destroyed or retained only with the assessed work, its lifecycle has a clear end. But the design I am proposing depends on the evidence outliving the assignment. A document collected by one student in 2026 should be available to another cohort in 2028 or 2029, alongside prices, interviews and documents gathered in the intervening years. The course is not only assessing students. It is building a local source collection.

That changes the questions. What exactly does the university hold after the assessment period? Who is its custodian? How long may it be retained? May another cohort consult it? What fresh permission is needed if it is later used for research or publication? These procedures can help answer those questions, but not automatically. An agreement that properly confines information to one course may rule out the very reuse on which the proposed archive depends.

The evidence is not the assignment

The student’s analysis is coursework. The material used to produce it is not necessarily the same thing. A waybill may contain personal or commercially sensitive information. Interview notes are harder still: they are neither the source’s own record nor the student’s analysis, but one person’s written account of what another person said, made for an assignment and now held by a lecturer.

Where the activity is classified as teaching rather than research, this third-party material can still raise a lifecycle question: do institutional rules cover its custody, retention and reuse after the assessment for which it was collected? The Manchester distinction is instructive here. A course collection built to outlive its cohorts is not a small amount of data gathered to practise a method, but neither does it fit neatly within research as that definition intends. It is a lifecycle problem created by a particular curricular ambition.

The reuse is the point

Ghana’s Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843) requires personal data to be collected for a specific, explicitly defined and lawful purpose, limits retention and requires further processing to be compatible with the original purpose. Material obtained for one student’s term paper and later made available to another cohort may involve further processing. Nothing in the waybill I received establishes permission for it to become part of a standing course collection.

The Act contains provisions for historical, statistical and research uses where the relevant conditions are met. Those provisions offer a governed route, not a retrospective blank cheque. They do not turn a lecturer’s folder into an institutional archive. The underlying principle is not unique to Ghana: UK guidance likewise treats purpose, storage and research-related reuse as connected but distinct questions.

Ordinary assignment governance is adequate for ordinary assignments. The problem appears when coursework is asked to do something additional: to enlarge a locally available documentary record over time.

The archival value and the governance risk arise from the same feature. An archive that cannot be consulted next year is not an archive. A collection that can be consulted next year without the source having been told is not a defensible one.

A small institutional answer

The answer need not be a new bureaucracy. It could begin with a short institutional instrument that separates use in a student’s assessment from retention in a course source collection. Before collection begins, it should state the teaching purpose, what may be collected, who may later consult it, how long it will be kept, which unit is responsible and what choices the source has. Research use or publication should require a separate decision rather than being hidden inside the phrase ‘educational purposes’.

The remaining requirement is custody. What one lecturer can require, only an institution can keep. A named custodian, controlled access, a retention and disposal schedule, and a record of what the course has produced would convert a personal folder into an accountable institutional practice. Existing MBA, ethics and confidentiality processes provide models; the task is to extend their discipline to the intended afterlife of the evidence.

Proportionality matters. If the process becomes heavier than the assessment it supports, colleagues may stop asking students to gather local evidence. But a department unable to provide a clear collection notice, a retention rule and somebody accountable for what returns should not require the fieldwork. Otherwise, institutional risk is transferred to students and to the businesses that agree to speak with them.

Readers can test this in ten minutes. Take your own institution’s course-based ethics route or classroom confidentiality agreement and look for two things: whether either says anything about third-party material after the assessment period, and who is named as responsible for it. If neither appears, ask where else the institution governs the evidence after the assignment ends. If there is no answer, the arrangements may govern the assignment without governing its evidentiary afterlife.

Before we ask for more

The curriculum can enlarge the archive. The qualification is that the archival ambition creates an additional governance obligation. The question is not only whether the evidence was collected ethically and kept confidentially. It is whether its intended custody, retention and reuse were made explicit before collection began.

I have a waybill in my files and no good institutional answer to those questions. That is not an argument against asking students to go and find out. It is an argument for deciding what we will do with what comes back, before we ask them to go.

Dr Carlene Kyeremeh is Associate Professor and Vice President, University Advancement, Recruitment and Research at All Nations University, Koforidua, Ghana. Her research addresses curriculum decolonisation, higher education policy in Africa and the Caribbean, and the political economy of educational technology.This post develops a governance question raised in Issues 14 and 15 of The Decolonized Curriculum, her LinkedIn newsletter.


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The SRHE Student Access and Experience Network

by Manny Madriaga

On the 28th February 2020, SRHE launched the new Student Access and Experience Network. The network merged two formerly separate networks to encompass the entire continuum of student participation in higher education from access to experience and success, providing an insight into academic, social as well as welfare aspects. (The launch event occurred on one of those non-strike days for those of us engaged in the UK’s UCU industrial action.) It also occurred as the Covid19 pandemic was beginning to emerge as a factor in the UK  life – the day before the launch, the UK government’s chief medical adviser, Professor Chris Whitty, indicated that the country could face at least a couple of months of disruption. At the time of writing, just over 40 days has passed since the launch event, and much has changed in all our lives. It definitely has affected our work, our relationships with each other, and our connections to our students. This has triggered us to open up a space to discuss many of the issues that we have recently confronted in the sector due to Covid19.  Particular questions have arisen as to whether university responses to the pandemic will reduce or exacerbate structural inequalities for students in accessing and engaging in HE. For instance, Dai O’Brien has described in a previous SRHE blogpost that teaching and working remotely during this time can be virtually inaccessible.          

The launch event highlighted key issues around the whole student lifecycle. The event began with questions around access and the history of university outreach programmes with Dr Julian Crockford’s presentation, ‘Tensions, Contradictions and Perpetual Loose Ends – ‘Widening Participation’ in HE Policy (audio and slides)’, outlining contentions around theory and practice in targeting interventions to specific groups of students. The seminar then extended conversations with Dr Camille Kandiko-Howson’s paper, ‘From Cinderella to Queen Bee: Student Experience Research (audio and slides)’, highlighting issues of student participation and success and the role of higher education institutions within that. Finally, the event provided an opportunity to explore inequalities in graduate outcomes with Professor Nicola Ingram and Dr Kim Allen sharing their recent work (audio and slides). 

From these stimulating presentations, questions and discussion emerged from the diverse audience of widening participation practitioners, researchers, and graduate students. In these conversations, we engaged with evidence of how higher education not only transforms students in positive, meaningful ways, but also significantly marginalises many. As a new network, we have set out to explore these processes of marginalisation and structural inequalities that affect the access and experiences of students in HE. The HE sector is rarely value-neutral and meritocratic. Instead, universities, and other higher education contexts, are highly contentious spaces, structured by class, gender, and race, among other things. Notions of the ‘traditional’ student obscure the varied pathways into higher education as well as the intersectional nature of students’ identities, including special needs backgrounds, experiences of care and estrangement, and age. It is worth mentioning here that Dr Kandiko-Howson rightly argued in her presentation that we should not be talking about the ‘student experience’ as something monolithic. We should be talking about student experiences. This is similar to the point made by Karen Gravett in her SRHE blogpost in challenging the dominant narrative of students as experiencing a homogeneous ‘student experience’ in their university transitions.   

The beauty of all three presentations at the SRHE SAEN launch event is the offer of conceptual tools to challenge dominant discourses in widening participation, student experience, and graduate employability.  Dr Crockford, for instance, shared his own experience of working in widening participation, shining a light on the data issues in monitoring and evaluating university access. Reflecting upon her own experience as convenor of SRHE’s Student Experience Network, Dr Kandiko-Howson held up and reminded attendees of the seven principles of good undergraduate teaching practice of Chickering and Gamson (1987). Being reminded of these principles parallels our own ambitions as a network in countering much of the deficit-oriented perceptions of students on issues of access, retention, and academic performance. Professor Ingram and Dr Allen introduced their ‘social magic conversion table’ to demonstrate how employers may sift and exclude certain groups of university graduates to construct their ‘ideal’ graduate hire.    

Although we come equipped with new knowledge and have made new connections with others across the sector, we do have anxieties and more questions about the state of higher education and our students during the time of global upheaval. The launch was one of the last events we actually attended in person. We are all working remotely and attempting to connect to our students with our online lectures. We are aware we are not the only ones. Thus, we are asking you to contribute to crowd-sourcing an array of the following to inform research, practice and policy in the area of widening access, student experience and progression in the light of Covid-19. Our goal is to bring together diverse perspectives, ensure all voices are heard, and start building a repository of ideas and solutions in response to current circumstances. 

Please add to the following Google document: https://tinyurl.com/sk6jv5h  

Based on the resultant log of initiatives we are hoping to bring together researchers and practitioners in moderated discussions in the coming months to inform policy and practice.

Dr Manny Madriaga is a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University. He is a co-convenor of the Society for Research in Higher Education Student Access and Experience Network.

Camille Kandiko


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International research on the student experience: Power, methodologies and translation

By Camille Kandiko Howson

The SRHE Student Experience Network featured a discussion at the 2014 SRHE Conference exploring international dimensions of student experience research. We featured three international speakers to provide examples of topics and challenges faced when conducting international and comparative research:

  • Madeleine Kapinga Mutatayi , from Congo DRC, Kinshasa, Phd student Department of Educational Sciences Center for Instructional Psychology and Technology at KU Leuven, Belgium
  • Dr Johanna Annala, Senior Lecturer, School of Education, University of Tampere, Finland
  • Dr Rebecca Schendel, Lecturer, Institute of Education, UCL, UK

The event was chaired by Student Experience Network co-convenor Camille Kandiko Howson with co-convenor Matthew Cheeseman in spiritu.

The Student Experience is growing in importance around the world (Barber 2013), whilst at the same time decreasing in common understanding, shared definitions and research coherence. This may be due to variety of foci of research into the student experience, including:

  • Curricular (learning gains, assessments, breadth and depth) (Douglass et al 2012; Crosling et al 2008)
  • Co-curricular (additional opportunities, such as community engagement, study abroad, and industry collaboration and employability) (Mourshed et al 2012)
  • Extra-curricular (accommodation, lifestyle, sports, societies, politics) (Thomas 2012; UNITE 2014)

These levels are then further compounded by levels of analysis, including individual, group (such as minority groups and international students), institutional (on topics such as governance, engagement and satisfaction), and inter/national (such as access, progression, labour market and rankings). Following the paradox of globalisation, and as countries around the world position higher education in society (such as dropping tuition fees in Germany and dramatically increasing them in the UK), what key issues about the student experience are of relevance across higher education research, beyond national politics and policies?

Two questions were used to stimulate topics for discussion:

  •  What research questions are not being asked about the student experience?
  • What research and evidence could promote productive, effective educational models of higher education?

Across national contexts, the importance of measuring and researching learning strongly emerged. Several delegates raised troublesome issues when Western views of educational research and practice were used in other contexts. This encompassed staff and student perceptions of the learning environment and their relationship to each other, in terms of culturally-bound classroom and research practices. This highlighted power issues between staff and students, particularly the notion of students publically challenging or critiquing staff, even in confidential research settings. A fundamental question arose about different national and cultural interpretations of the concept of student voice, and the need for more comparative work about what student voice means in practice in different political contexts, inside and outside of the university setting.

The challenges of borrowing, or imposing, Western views were also discussed in relation to methodologies, particularly the use of large-scale surveys. The US-based National Survey of Student Engagement offered both the opportunity for comparative research of student engagement and student learning using a validated tool but researchers noted that many of the underlying theories are culturally-bound, such as ‘ideal’ forms of engagement between staff and students and notions of democratic participation, particularly in non-Democratic settings. From East Asia to Africa to the Middle East, different perspectives and modes of interaction were discussed. Related methodological issues were challenges in translating English-based research resources into other languages and cultural settings.

A useful framework picked up from conference presentations was that of using ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘powerful understanding’ when crossing borders, using international methods and tools and in partnering with colleagues.

This seminar concluded with a desire to share opportunities for collaboration and participation in exploring these areas of research. This entry is a start to this endeavour, welcoming comments and proposals for projects that could carried out in multiple national contexts and engage the international higher education research community. So please comment, share and get in touch with one another!

Dr Camille Kandiko Howson is a research fellow at King’s College London and co-editor of The Global Student Experience: An International and Comparative Analysis. 

Barber, M., Donnelly, K., and Rizvi, S. (2013) An Avalanche is coming: Higher Education and the Revolution Ahead, London: Institute for Public Policy Research

Crosling, G., Thomas, L. and Heaney, M. (2008) Improving Student Retention in Higher Education- The role of teaching and learning, London: Routledge

Douglass, J. A., Thomson, G., & Zhao, C. M. (2012). The learning outcomes race: the value of self-reported gains in large research universities. Higher Education, 64(3), 317-335.

Staddon, E., & Standish, P. (2012). Improving the student experience. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 46(4), 631–648.

Mourshed, M., Farrell, D. And Barton, D. (2012) Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works, Washington, DC: McKinsey Center for Government

Thomas, L. (2012) Building student engagement and belonging in Higher Education at a time of change: a summary of findings and recommendations from the What Works? Student Retention & Success programme, London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation

UNITE (2014) Living and Learning in 2034- A higher education futures project, University Alliance and UNITE.