Why assessment fairness does not feel the same to every student

Updated Sep 07, 2026

Students can distinguish the fairness of an assessment procedure from the fairness of the result they receive. K. Skylar Powell, Maria Kambouri and Panagiotis Rentzelas examine how these judgements relate to students’ views of themselves.

What the experiment found

The study involved 214 undergraduate business students: 105 in the United States and 109 in South Korea. Participants completed a laboratory card-sorting task with manipulated feedback, then judged assessment procedures and outcomes. Self-construal concerned how independently or relationally participants understood themselves.

Self-construal did not significantly predict preferences for relative versus absolute assessment procedures. For outcome fairness, however, self-esteem moderated the relationship. Among more interdependent participants, higher self-esteem was associated with accepting lower outcomes as fair; the direction was reversed among more independent participants.

This was a controlled task with a specific student sample and limited fairness measures. It does not establish how an individual will respond to a real grade, or validate using comments to predict disengagement. Nationality should not be used as a substitute for an individual’s measured characteristics.

Questions for assessment teams

As editorial suggestions, give students a clear route to ask about the marking process and the reasons for their result. When reviewing comments, distinguish concerns about criteria, procedure and outcome before deciding what needs investigation.

A complaint deserves an appropriate response regardless of a student’s presumed self-esteem. Do not use this study to dismiss a concern as a personality issue or to infer psychological characteristics from a short comment.

Reference

K. Skylar Powell, Maria Kambouri and Panagiotis Rentzelas. “It’s (un)fair! undergraduate student self-construals, self-esteem, and perceptions of summative assessment fairness.” Studies in Higher Education. DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2026.2637821.

Reviewed 7 September 2026 against the accepted manuscript. The revision narrows practical claims and removes unsupported assertions that fairness comments predict disengagement.