Assessment harm can hide behind routine evaluation
Updated Aug 09, 2026
An assessment survey can show that students think a process is unfair. It may not show whether they experience that process as intimidating or harmful, or whether they feel safe enough to say so. Süleyman Nihat Şad, Meltem Yurtçu, Niyazi Özer and Nuri Erdemir's Journal of Further and Higher Education paper, "University students' exposure to mobbing through assessment: the neglected dark side of educational evaluation", makes that gap difficult to ignore. For UK universities, the paper raises a practical student voice question: can routine evaluation distinguish dissatisfaction with assessment from a concern that needs protected follow-up?
Context and research question
Students can describe an assessment as unfair for several reasons. The criteria may be unclear, marking may feel inconsistent, or the outcome may fall short of expectations. As earlier research on why assessment fairness feels different across students shows, those judgements do not all point to the same problem. The present paper pushes the question further by examining what the authors call "mobbing through assessment": students' perceived exposure to harmful conduct through measurement and evaluation processes.
The researchers surveyed 1,048 students, 541 women and 507 men, across four faculties at one medium-sized university in Turkey. They used the Mobbing through Measurement and Evaluation Scale, then applied a 2 × 4 × 4 three-way ANOVA to test the main and interaction effects of student gender, the instructor's academic title, and faculty. The study therefore asks both how much harmful assessment treatment students perceive and whether those perceptions vary across institutional groups.
For UK Student Experience and Quality teams, the research is useful as an early-warning prompt rather than a sector benchmark. It shows what a dedicated measure can surface, but the single-institution design, national context, and absence of the scale's individual items from the abstract all limit how far the reported pattern can travel.
Key findings
Students reported a moderate overall level of perceived mobbing through assessment. The paper's abstract summarises the central result directly:
"participating students perceive themselves exposed to moderate level of mobbing through assessment in general."
That wording matters. The study records students' perceptions through a scale; it does not independently verify individual incidents. Even with that limitation, a moderate average across 1,048 respondents is a reason to examine whether standard assessment feedback is overlooking experiences that students regard as more serious than poor design or disappointing marks.
The pattern varied across gender, faculty, and instructor title. The highest reported level occurred among male students taught by assistant professors in the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. Women generally reported lower levels, with the lowest result among women taught by associate professors in the same faculty. These interaction effects suggest that an institution-wide average can conceal concentrated experiences within particular settings.
The subgroup result should not become a ready-made risk profile. The finding comes from one university and depends on local academic roles, faculty cultures, and the properties of the scale. UK institutions should not infer that one gender, discipline, or staff grade is inherently more exposed or more responsible. The transferable lesson is methodological: analyse differences locally, then investigate the context before assigning meaning.
Assessment feedback may contain both quality signals and safety signals. A comment about vague criteria needs a course response. A comment suggesting intimidation, retaliation, or degrading treatment may need a protected route beyond the module team. Evidence that harmful feedback can suppress student voice reinforces why universities should not send every assessment concern through the same workflow.
Practical implications
UK universities should separate assessment quality from potential harm when designing feedback questions. Ask whether criteria, marking, and feedback were clear and consistent, but also whether students felt respected and knew how to raise a serious concern safely. This gives teams a better chance of routing an assessment-design problem to programme review and a conduct concern to the right protected process.
Institutions should offer an open-text route without presenting a routine module evaluation as a substitute for reporting. Students need clear signposting when a concern falls within complaints, safeguarding, harassment, or staff conduct procedures. The wider OfS focus on whether students understand reporting and support routes makes the benefit clear: universities can listen for patterns while still giving individual students an appropriate path to help.
Teams should analyse patterns across faculties, programmes, cohorts, and demographic groups, with small-cell protection. A whole-university average may hide a repeated concern in one setting, but subgroup analysis can also create disclosure and misinterpretation risks. Minimum reporting thresholds, documented categories, and human review help institutions locate a pattern without turning a small number of comments into an accusation.
Finally, universities should triangulate survey results with complaints, appeals, focus groups, and assessment review evidence. A scale or comment can show where to look; it cannot determine what happened on its own. Following a governance checklist for student comment analysis keeps redaction, escalation, access, and interpretation responsibilities visible, giving quality and safeguarding teams a more defensible basis for action.
FAQ
Q: How can a university apply this paper to its assessment surveys?
A: Keep routine questions about clarity, consistency, workload, and feedback, then add a carefully worded item about respectful treatment and a voluntary open-text prompt. Explain that the survey is not monitored as an urgent reporting channel, and provide a separate confidential route for concerns about conduct or safety. This produces more diagnostic feedback without implying that a survey can replace case handling.
Q: Does the study prove that particular staff groups expose students to more assessment harm?
A: No. It reports students' scale-based perceptions at one Turkish university and identifies interactions between gender, faculty, and instructor title. It does not establish causation or justify applying that subgroup pattern elsewhere. UK teams should test local evidence, review effect sizes and scale validity in the full paper, and investigate context before drawing conclusions.
Q: What does this change about student voice practice more broadly?
A: It shows that collection and escalation need to be designed together. Universities should be able to distinguish a recurring quality issue from a potentially serious individual concern, preserve the student's own account, and make ownership clear. Student voice becomes safer and more useful when students know who will see their feedback, what may happen next, and where they can seek direct support.
References
[Paper Source]: Süleyman Nihat Şad, Meltem Yurtçu, Niyazi Özer and Nuri Erdemir "University students' exposure to mobbing through assessment: the neglected dark side of educational evaluation" DOI: 10.1080/0309877X.2026.2705570
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