Why do students resist assessment by group-work? Hearing critique in the complaint

Abstract

The cry that today’s higher education students are particularly individualist is a commonly-heard one. In England, the considerable personal cost of tuition is often blamed for creating a series of negative student traits, including consumerism (an idea that one has bought the right to a degree) and individualism (a sense of the individual as the beneficiary of the bought product, as against any sense of collectivism, or education as public good). This paper explores one element of students’ purported individualism: their resistance to group-work as an aspect of assessment. Presenting interview data with university students in England, it argues that such student disquiet does not stem from a resistance to collectivism in general. Using pragmatic sociology, the paper considers students’ often gentle and humorous comments about group-work as critique, not complaint. Rather than understanding students’ resistance to group-work as individualist grievance about doing something they would simply rather not do, this way of conceptualising their comments understands students as making critical points about what should be assessed for at university. It argues that this way of thinking about resistance to group-work leads us to take that resistance seriously, and in turn to take students seriously as interlocuters on educational matters.

Introduction

Previous decades have seen the introduction or significant increase of university tuition fees for students in many European countries. In this context, the idea that students’ identities, and their conceptions of the purpose of higher education, must similarly have changed has gained currency (Brooks et al., 2022). In England, tuition fees for home-domiciled undergraduates have tripled, and tripled again, over the last 25 years, and this has led to the contention that students are increasingly consumerist (see, for instance, Molesworth et al., 2009; Nixon et al., 2018; Williams, 2012). Consumerism, in this context, is a belief amongst students that through high fees one has bought an education and should have a consumer’s say over that education’s form. In this version of consumerism, not only has one bought the right to an education but, by logical extension, the right to high marks (and perhaps guaranteed access to a job too). Specifically, for our purposes in this article, the consumerist atmosphere purportedly created by the high fee regime can lead to a fear that students have become individualist, and resistant to collaborating with others who may dilute the grade that they are rightfully owed.

These aspects of student identity (consumerism and individualism) are sometimes treated as necessary knock-on effects of the fees themselves. This is some notion that apparently ‘neoliberal’ drivers characterising the marketised university constitute a reality so real that there is no outside of it (Gibson-Graham, 1996). Yet the existence, or not, of consumerist or individualist student beliefs is an empirical question, and it should be investigated as such. This article is conceived of, then, as a contribution to literature that directly talks to students in English higher education about their apparent consumerism and, rather than arguing that they are or are not consumerist in general, seeks to get to grips with the specificity and complexity of what students have to say (see, for example, Brooks and Abrahams, 2018; Budd, 2018; Tomlinson, 2017).

The precise route into this discussion is students’ experiences with assessment by group-work. By assessment, I mean academic work that is to be graded by teachers. Group-work is an increasingly popular assessment type, and one reason given for its pertinence for today’s students is that it is an anti-individualist way of assessing (see, for example, Kidder and Bowes-Sperry, 2012). That is, one rationale for the increasing use of assessment by group-work is that it encourages a collaborative, other-focused mindset designed to counter today’s students’ purported problems of consumerism and individualism. The importance of countering those drives might be presented as a political matter of resistance to the marketisation of the university, as related to students’ personal and social development, or as crucial for the modern workplace where team-work is often key.

Given this way of framing the value of group-work as residing in its collaborative and other-focused nature, students’ resistance to this form of assessment can likewise come to be framed as problematically individualist. To think of students’ resistance to assessment by group-work as complaint, or grievance, is to think of it as an individual expression of unhappiness or distaste. By contrast, in this article I present that resistance as critique. Using and adapting some ideas from the pragmatic sociology of critique (in particular from Boltanski, 1990, 2009; Boltanski and Thévenot, 1992), I conceive of critique as an attempt to move beyond the particularities of individual grievance, to make a more general claim about what matters, or what should be valued in a particular context (in this case, educational assessment).

Not only do students question whether particular values are the right ones to be assessed at university. They go beyond this by drawing attention to the way that multiple different and even contradictory values (learning for its own sake, employability, consumerism) are brought together in higher education without significant comment on the confusion that ensues. Students seek clarity, while the strategies of academics (bringing in ever greater numbers of assessed elements, and more and more learning outcomes) seem to complicate things more and more.

The comments on group-work below were often made gently and with good humour, incidentally and in the course of discussing another topic. This is not how we are generally in the habit of conceptualising critique. But I argue that we are better equipped to have conversations with students on an equal footing when we think of comments like these as part of an ordinary, everyday practice of critique. In the final analysis, my interest is not in which values students find appropriate in educational settings (this is, as we will see, different for different students, and for different sorts of activities that they describe), but simply in establishing that they do this critical work and are not merely airing personal, individualist complaint.

Marketisation, the student as consumer, and critique

Fears about a consumerist student identity can be placed in the context of a series of developments within the English higher education system that can be glossed as marketisation. Critics have argued that, since the late 1970s, economic values of competition and productivity have come to dominate the educational policy landscape. No longer taken to be one political framing amongst others, such economic conceptions have attained the status of policy common sense (Ball, 2012). In the higher education sphere, this has meant reforms that bring the sector more in line with a consumer market. The Browne Report in 2010, for instance, called for reform on three fronts: increasing participation because demand from students for higher education was higher than supply, and especially improving fair access to elite universities; improving quality, transparency and accountability; and making funding for the sector sustainable by increasing private contributions – that is, increasing fees and transitioning from personal grants from the government to repayable loans (Callender and Scott, 2013).

In this context, a series of changes in teaching practices and conceptualisations of the ideal student and the ideal academic have emerged, including that of the student consumer that concerns us here. Such changes have been criticised by both academics and students.

One key effect of marketisation has been an increasing focus on teaching ‘quality’ or ‘excellence’. For advocates, the turn to teaching quality is a welcome corrective to an earlier focus on research as the main indicator of prestige within the sector. The drive to improve teaching, most recently in England through a national teaching audit and grading exercise, the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (see Gunn, 2022), derives from marketisation. The logic encourages institutions to compete for students, framed as consumers able to take their money (in the form of tuition fees) elsewhere. Students’ ability to choose will, in this formulation, drive up standards across the sector (see, for instance, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015). In order to facilitate students’ good choices, education itself must become more visible, and measurable.

This way of framing higher education has been criticised on several fronts. While the idea of a free market is purportedly central, critics point out that constructing the student as a consumer has in fact led to increasing oversight and intervention on the part of governments (French and O’Leary, 2017), the Teaching Excellence Framework being only the most recent instance. Rather than loosening hierarchies by reducing the importance of traditional prestige acquired through a focus on research, those hierarchies prove to be remarkably resilient in the face of policy change (Bathmaker et al, 2016; Croxford and Raffe, 2015). Inequalities between students themselves in terms of socio-economic background and the institution attended have also endured within an increasingly marketised system (Brown, 2018; Burke, 2016; Leathwood and O’Connell, 2003). These are inequalities that student consumerism and the prizing of choice were supposed to disrupt (see, for instance, Willetts, 2017). And while choice is presented as empowering to students according to the consumerist logic, the flip side of increased choice is personalised risk and anxiety (Ball, 2003; Brynin, 2012).

Another feature of an increasingly marketised higher education, according to critics, has been an increasingly instrumentalised conception of the value of a degree. When education is thought of as a personal choice and investment in one’s future, rather than a public good bringing the benefits of a well-educated population to all, our conception of what constitutes a valuable education is likewise narrowed. For instance, a concern with employability may increase the take-up of the science subjects over the humanities (Brewer, 2018), or lead universities to focus unduly on embodied competences like presentation skills (Brown et al., 2003) at the expense of subject knowledge. This increasing attention to student employability has been criticised for its focus on the supply side of graduates over the demand side of employers: that is, whether there are in fact appropriate jobs for students to go to (Brown et al., 2011, 2015, 2016).

One final consequence of the marketisation of higher education provision that is of relevance to this article is what Biesta (2010b) calls ‘learnification’. This is the increasing centrality of the student (framed more actively as the learner), and the concomitant downplay of the role of the teacher. In a learner-centric model, a focus on the teacher’s actions, and the content they have to impart, is framed as domineering on a political level, and ineffective on a pedagogical one. Instead, it is the learner who should be centred as an active contributor to knowledge, while the lecturer becomes a facilitator. This relates to our concern with group work in this article since interactions with other students are here prized as more important than interactions with teachers.

This elevation of the learner has been censured for feeding a consumerist mentality in which education becomes something that students themselves are best placed to choose, direct and assess. As critics point out, learnification can be paradoxical. The role of the teacher is downplayed yet at the same time the prominence given to student evaluations means that teachers are increasingly blamed for any problems with the learning process. Students have pointed out that while these moves supposedly centre the learner, there is a strong element of control in how ‘good’ learner identities are policed: the student must become an entrepreneurial self-starter ready for the workplace (Claus et al., 2018). In a final paradox, and as we will explore in more detail in the findings section, collaboration between students is key to a learner-centred pedagogy – yet engagement with others is understood as a private good since its benefit is primarily one of personal self-development (Gourlay, 2017).

The marketisation of higher education and its effects on students (instrumentalisation, consumerism, learnification), then, exist alongside a large critical literature coming from higher education itself. As a number of critical scholars argue (for example, Ashwin, 2020), it is quite possible for universities to be simultaneously sites for the advancement of regressive policies, and sites where critique of just those policies takes place. Universities have a long history of complicity with regressive policies and economist mindsets, and students and workers have a long history of resistance within, through and beyond its structures (Meyerhoff, 2019).

In terms of our concern here with students, empirical research has often found that the supposedly consumerist beliefs for which students are either upbraided (by academics) or celebrated (by politicians) are in fact highly complex, messy and ambivalent (Brooks and Abrahams, 2018; Tomlinson, 2017). This article builds on the critical work drawn upon in this section, which challenges both marketisation, and simplistic ideas about how marketisation affects student identities.

Beyond procedural questions about assessment

Academic scholarship about assessment by group-work has tended to focus on procedural questions, rather than the more critical questions posed in the scholarship on marketisation above. By procedural, I mean questions such as what type of learning objectives can be met by group-work, whether these objectives are clear and made explicit to students, and in turn whether assessment by group-work as it is actually practised does, in fact, facilitate the meeting of those objectives. While this approach is extremely useful, I argue that an important addition to such technical or proceduralist concerns is the question of value. That is, not just the question of how best to measure something that we think is important, but also the question of how to decide what is important in the first place.

An example of the procedural approach is a recent systematic literature review by Tumpa et al. (2022). It reviews the state of current research in terms of how to improve group-work assessments, but not whether group-work is a good sort of assessment for achieving particular learning aims. And even where that question is asked, the earlier question of whether the aim itself is a good one (and how we might determine that) is not addressed. Academic work on the problem of free riding in group assessment, for instance, tends to begin from the assumption that free riding and social loafing are pathologies that need to be solved on a technical level (for example, Maiden and Perry, 2011). But by taking a step back to a concern with values, we might first ask the question: is free riding in group-work a problem? If we agree that it is, then what makes it a problem?

As a number of sociologists and philosophers of education have pointed out in other contexts (see, for example, James, 2000), to ask technical questions of the procedural sort is to ask whether a certain assessment technique is a good way to test for certain sorts of things and, if it is, how we can make it better at doing that job. This approach does not ask more fundamental questions about whether those sorts of things that are being tested for (collaboration or employability, in the case of group-work) are good things to test for in the first place. This is because the question of whether collaboration is a good thing to test for is not a technical or procedural question but an axiological one (Biesta, 2015). This is a question concerned with values: with what matters to us (Sayer, 2011) as educators, and what matters to other educators, students, and others involved in education. To explore assessment by group-work axiologically, we will turn to the tools of the pragmatic sociology of critique.

Disentangling educational values: The pragmatic sociology of critique as methodology

The approach taken in this article is, then, one that is attendant to values. It asks us to take a step back from proceduralist questions about learning objectives and the rest, to ask why this is my objective. Why do I want students to learn this or that? Even if I know that my value is ‘collaboration’ or ‘employability’, why is that my value? In order to answer these questions, this article makes a particular use of some ideas from Luc Boltanski and colleagues, in particular Love and Justice as Competences (Boltanski, 1990), On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1992) and the later On Critique (Boltanski, 2009).

The pragmatic sociology of critique asks us to pay attention to the plurality of values that could, potentially, matter to people in a particular situation. Walzer (1983: 5), an important precursor to this pragmatic tradition, sums up the importance of an attendance to plurality when he writes that, ‘Justice is a human construction, and it is doubtful that it can be made in only one way’. That is, rather than thinking of what is important to people in binary terms (this is important to me or it isn’t; I find this behaviour to be right or wrong), we should focus on the work people do, in co-ordination with others, to decide on what is the important value in this particular context.

In matters of educational assessment, for instance, an academic or student might think that educational matters should be kept separate from any external consideration, like employability or the learning of social skills. Such educational purism will be conceived of here as an inspirational value (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1992). Some might hold inspirational values in some educational contexts, but nonetheless argue that preparation for employment is also a valid concern for universities. The concern with employability is a type of industrial value, and many contemporary forms of educational assessment could be seen as compromises between inspirational and industrial ideas about worth. Similarly, some may feel that one important part of university study is the development of social skills and the fostering of friendships. Such domestic values will also come into play in what we explore below.

The plurality of value systems of potential relevance in any context creates both the potential for conflict, and the continual search for compromise. In the extracts shown below, students sometimes paint a harmonious picture of a shared value between themselves and an academic setting group-work as an assessment. At others they agree on a shared value – employability, say – but disagree that group-work is a good way of testing students for that value. Critique of this sort – which shares a value but disagrees on the measurement of that value – can be conceptualised as a reformist critique. Where students disagree more fundamentally that industrial, or domestic, values are appropriate within university assessments, we can think of this as a radical critique. To describe critique as radical, then, is not to say that radical educators would agree with it. It is to say that there is radical disagreement here, between students and academics, about the appropriate value to measure in an educational assessment.

This article builds on the above ideas in a specific way that was first developed in (Telling, 2023). Specifically, I focus on the idea of entangling and disentangling values. I argue that contemporary higher education increasingly compounds, or entangles, different values in complex ways (hoping to foster student employability alongside a love of learning rather than instead of it; to create students who are well-rounded and cultured as well as technically proficient). By contrast, many students and academics seek to disentangle values: to pull out a specific value that feels important in a particular context. The critiques of group-work articulated by student interviewees in this article are analysed as examples of disentangling of this sort: attempts to challenge the compaction of values in education, and to isolate which value is important.

Research within the pragmatic sociology of critique, for instance On Justification, often proceeds by describing discrete value systems (especially in written form), before thinking about plurality, or how values may be compromised together, or picked between. Much sociology of education, on the other hand, begins from the idea of different, potentially diametrically opposed, actors bringing their different bundles of value to each new situation. Both approaches, analytically quite justifiable, seek to do the job of tidying up a messy reality to make it legible. By contrast, the approach in this paper is to start with the mess, and show how actors in the situation themselves try to tidy it up, or reduce its complexity (Biesta, 2010a).

I seek to draw attention to the act or practice of students making justice-claims about what should or shouldn’t be assessed in higher education. This is not, then, about itemising in turn the specific value systems appealed to by different students when discussing group-work, which would be a largely descriptive endeavour. Likewise, my point is not to intervene in debates about what the correct value for educational assessment ought, in fact, to be. Instead, my aim is simply to demonstrate the existence of thoughtful, values-based critique, where individualist complaint is sometimes seen instead.

The study

This article presents extracts from online video interviews conducted with students in English higher education institutions, when group-work as an assessment method was mentioned by them. However, group-work was not the focus of the project from which the material has been drawn. Instead, the extracts below are all taken from moments in interviews when students mentioned group-work, without prompting: sometimes as casual asides, as illustrative examples, or as part of a list they were itemising. Not all instances are critical in the negative sense. Rather than taking their incidental nature to reflect a lack of importance per se, I use these instances to make a larger claim about the everydayness of ordinary critique.

I was interviewing students as part of a wider project on the emergence and growth of interdisciplinary degrees named ‘liberal arts’ in English higher education. This has been an area of substantial expansion: a fifth of English universities (in addition to a significant number of higher education institutions that do not have the title ‘university’) now offer a liberal arts degree, and almost all of these are new courses that began recruiting in the last 20 years.

Liberal arts degrees were considered, by most staff and students I interviewed, as at the forefront of a series of changes happening within English higher education: from disciplinarity to interdisciplinarity, from specialism to generalism and from teacher-centrism to learner-centrism. The liberal arts are, then, a good case study to explore a series of concerns in higher education today, including the idea that students are increasingly consumerist and individualist, and that education needs to align more closely to the workplace.

The research entailed in-person interviews with nine academics, at three universities with differing missions, in 2017; online interviews with 26 students, at seven universities, between 2018 and 2019; and discourse analysis of all applicant-facing institutional webpages advertising liberal arts degrees in 2019 (23 institutions). All names given below are pseudonyms, and no institutions are identified.

While I did talk to academics as part of this project, then, I have chosen not to give voice to those participants in this article. (For presentation of these findings, see Telling, 2019, 2020, 2023.) The danger is that in presenting academics’ voices followed by students’ voices, an opposition would be set up between academics and students. Instead, as part of my presentation of students’ voices here, I include what students thought that academics thought. This is not because I think that what students think academics think is the same as what academics ‘really think’, but rather because, in framing their critiques of group-work, students often reflected on what they thought were academics’ reasons for setting this type of assessment. Whether students were correct or not in their assessments is not very important here; rather, the work of explaining someone else’s reasons is part of the work of critique (as opposed to mere complaint), and so is important in understanding the critique itself.

The pragmatic approach outlined in the previous section understands decisions about value as both relational and situated (Abbott, 2019): not only does the act of disentangling relate to some specific entanglement; it also emerges in dialogue with others. Specifically, here, disentangling happens in the research interview. Whilst an attendance to actors’ own questions, justifications and critiques can lend itself to a number of methodological choices, there is good reason to use qualitative interviews here. However apparently mundane or descriptive our questions are, interviewees often elevate our discussion to greater levels of generality than this, and in particular to critique (Holmqvist, 2022). This makes interviews a particularly helpful methodological choice when we are interested in how individuals make decisions about what matters in a situation.

Clearly, students who volunteer to give their time for free to be interviewed about the structure of their degree are not representative of their cohort. This is compounded by the fact that, as a student once said to me at a conference, liberal arts degrees tend to appeal, in the first place, to intellectually very curious, often energetic, ‘keen beans’. The voices heard in this article may appear more engaged in questions of degree coherence and intellectual challenge than the average student – and so, no doubt, they are. Yet paying attention to such voices is an important reminder of what I argue throughout: that the capacity for critique, whether encouraged to the fore by an interview, or springing forth from a highly engaged and thoughtful student, must be at the front of our minds whenever we seek to take complaint seriously.

This should not imply that interviews are the only space where such justification happens. We can understand all educational spaces as pregnant with the possibility for critique, dispute, compromise and reconciliation, and interviewees are not making up what they think within interviews ‘the way one comes up with an alibi’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1992: 37). Interviews encourage justification but this is not because of some inherent artificiality of interviewing as a method that elicits false critique. Rather it is because, like any social encounter, interviews encourage some sorts of discussion and make other sorts less likely (Hughes et al., 2020). Interviews have their tropes, their scripts and their norms, it’s true, but no more or less than the classroom or the staff meeting or the bus stop. The fact that interviews are in some sense facilitative of justification does not make them artificial encounters, but only encounters of a particular sort – and a sort very useful for the discovery of everyday critique.

Findings

The remainder of this article presents students’ attempts to disentangle the different values presented to them through group-work by assessment. While group-work was not the focus of the project, it did come up regularly in discussion with students, for two reasons. Firstly, the growth of the liberal arts was conceived of as specifically related to skills development for the workplace, and group-work was, in turn, thought of as at least potentially helpful for that goal. And secondly, group-work came up because of the interdisciplinarity of these degrees, which is unusual in the English context. One purpose for group-work as far as students saw it was getting them together in interdisciplinary teams, where different sorts of expertise from different students could be brought together.

In the next section, we focus on those times that students mentioned industrial values about preparation for the workplace when discussing group-work. I argue here that, whether they approve of assessments conceived of as preparation for the workplace or not, students exhibit clear anti-consumerist tendencies. In the next section I discuss domestic values of sociability and friendship formation as possible reasons for introducing assessment by group-work. Here I argue that, in their complex engagements with this possible explanation, students do not exhibit individualist beliefs.

In both cases, students questioned whether a particular value (industrial or domestic) could indeed be measured well through group-work assessments, and also wondered whether this was the appropriate sort of value to be measuring at all. And in the final findings section we turn to those moments when students sought to challenge, and untangle, complexity itself: for instance, the use of complex work-allocation models for group-work, or of multiple learning aims.

Group-work as preparation for the workplace? Industrial worth and the question of consumerism

Many students believed that a key reason that academics used group-work as a form of assessment was to do with industrial worth. That is, learning to work in a team had often been presented to students as good preparation for future work, since they would be expected to co-operate in teams in that context. Irrespective of whether teachers did indeed believe it, this view would be a criticism of students’ individualism, but specifically from the industrial perspective that their individualism is a bar to students’ work-readiness. First, we will examine students’ criticisms that questioned how successful group-work is at developing industrial worth. Second, we will explore instances where students questioned, more radically, whether industrial worth is an appropriate thing for an assessment to test for at all. Despite their apparent opposition, in both cases what students have to say works against the notion that they have a consumerist mindset, desiring to be spoon-fed or gifted a degree.

A number of students agreed that becoming prepared for employment was a key reason for coming to higher education, and especially for studying an interdisciplinary degree. Devendra, for instance, had just come to the end of his liberal arts degree, where he had maintained his interests across the humanities and the natural sciences (eventually specialising in philosophy and chemistry). Like a number of students, he frequently mentioned the difficulty of studying across such disparate disciplines, and connected this to his feeling that a liberal arts degree, as he had pursued it, prepared him well for the challenges of the workplace. This is because he felt that modern employees needed a range of skills to move between complex problems within a job, and also to move between a large number of different jobs, as he expected to do in his career.

However, he compared his own way of pursuing the degree for the challenge it offered him with that of many of his peers. He also compared it to the approach of academics, who did not require students to study across multiple subjects or, indeed, to come out of their comfort zones at all. It was in this context that he inserted an aside about group-work:

Devendra:

It’s very much been sold to us as a degree made in response to the requirements of employers, but there seems to be a disconnect on what the employers have asked for, to some extent, and what’s been done. If that makes sense?

Interviewer:

Yeah, can you say a bit more about that? What do you think the disconnect is?

Devendra:

So, they’re asking, or want, certain skills from our graduates that they want to employ, but beyond group-work, I would say that they haven’t really done much. For example, I think in [this university], only thirty per cent of the students have done any science of any kind. So, I’d say most aren’t very good with numbers, for example, which I think most employers would definitely be after. I feel like – like I said it can be very easy to have an easy ride and not push yourself or actually try and do more than one thing. I know people that have only done English and the core modules throughout the degree. So to me it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense.

Devendra agrees that industrial values are appropriate for this context (he wants to be prepared for work) but not that they are being developed. This is a corrective critique: yes, employability is important; no, it is not being developed.

Throughout the interview, Devendra criticised the ‘easy ride’ that students were permitted to have if they wanted it. He prized industrial values: those qualities that make someone a good employee, to be attained, unavoidably, through hard work. He distinguished this from the values of the market: treating students as consumers to be kept happy, chiefly through high levels of individual freedom to study what they wished – even if it was ‘just English and the core modules’.

Group-work becomes the easy face of employability, consistently touted as what makes liberal arts students employable, when it would be much harder (but nonetheless, from Devendra’s perspective, more appropriate) to require students to study some science. While academic critics of the employability agenda in English higher education, such as Molesworth et al. (2009), argue that students are now seeking degrees as destinations rather than as journeys, and thus look for the easiest route possible, for Devendra seeking to be genuinely prepared for work requires being challenged by the educational experience.

The industrial conception of group-work as work-preparation seeks to focus our attention on the process rather than the product of assessment. That is, what matters is the development of particular skills, so that the student is someone different (a team player) than they were before (an individualist). Scholarship in group-work assessment, similarly, often focuses on moving students’ attention away from the product of assessment (the essay, presentation, portfolio or whatever), and toward the process of having learnt a new skill (see, for example, Riebe et al., 2016).

A number of students who criticised the placing of industrial values at the heart of assessment, however, explicitly sought to re-focus our attention on the product. They had not failed to grasp the new focus on process, but rather thought that producing a good piece of work that has something to contribute to an academic debate is a good in itself. This focus on the product was phrased in the language of inspirational educational values (students talked about ‘quality research’, ‘doing it properly’). While some academics may worry that a focus on the product means instrumentality, students used the inspirational language of ‘education for its own sake’ in this context, and feared that the academics’ focus on process was bringing inappropriate aims (such as employability) into the properly academic task of producing a serious piece of work.

The problem was not necessarily the group-work itself, but that the product to be created tended not to be at the centre of the design of group-work assessments. Finalist Jessica, for instance, had largely enjoyed and learned from her liberal arts degree. (Like Devendra, she had prioritised intellectual challenge and what she perceived as true interdisciplinarity across the sciences and humanities.) She largely used group-work assessments to exemplify some of the issues with academic ‘quality’ on her degree, especially, as for a number of other students, when it came to unconventional assessments (podcasts, research proposals) on core modules. Like some other students in this context, she used the word ‘forced’:

We had to make a podcast. We had to get in groups with people we’d never met before and record a ten-minute podcast with an interdisciplinary approach to some idea. There was no structure at all; we had to try and apply several different ideas whilst thinking through a problem. [. . .] This is not quality research. It felt like it was very forced.

Jessica contrasted the forced nature of what she considered an ill thought-through assessment with what she, here and elsewhere, referred to as ‘quality’ interdisciplinary work. While within pedagogical scholarship, authentic assessment is sometimes taken to mean ‘like the real world’ – which tends, in turn, to be taken to mean ‘like the workplace’ – authentic (not forced) assessment here means aligned to students’ values (McArthur, 2022). Jessica tells us that she is in university to create academic products of quality: an inspirational mode of learning for its own sake.

A number of students made a distinction between preparation for the workplace as a by-product of university study, and the fundamental value they considered to be at the heart of what they were doing. As highly inspirationally-minded student Lijuan, who consistently stressed that education should be pursued for its own sake, put it: ‘Okay, I think [group-work] helps with career stuff, but to be fair, [. . .] those things should be separate to the aims’. This is an attempt to disentangle complicated aims for liberal arts degrees: that they should prepare students for employment as well as maintaining the high educational standards that Lijuan is looking for. She does not denounce the importance of other values in general. Instead, what matters is this context. Lijuan questions whether employability is the right type of value to bring to bear when designing a fair educational assessment. This is a question about what to do here, in this place, and she certainly did not argue against being prepared for work in general. To say ‘but to be fair. . .’ is to say that we need to settle on a specific value that is appropriate for an assessment – and employability is not it.

Lijuan and Jessica are different from Devendra who, above, doubted whether employability was adequately being fostered by universities through the easy choice of group-work. Devendra’s is a corrective critique: ‘Is this a good sort of assessment to measure students’ employability?’ Lijuan’s question is a more radical questioning of the appropriate value to bring to bear here: ‘Is employability a good think to assess for in a university test?’ While corrective critiques can reinforce existing ways of thinking (‘is this a good way to measure employability?’ presumes that employability is something for universities to measure), radical critiques take a step further back to ask the earlier question (Holmqvist, 2022).

Devendra, Jessica and Lijuan were students highly motivated by intellectual challenge, and critical of its absence in some parts of their university experience. It was in the context of this absence of challenge that they mentioned group-work. The point here is not that such highly motivated students are representative of all students, or even of all liberal arts students in England. Their voices are instead presented to demonstrate that criticism of group-work can be motivated by values other than the market (‘I’m a consumer and shouldn’t have to do work I don’t want to do’). Quite conversely, and whether they agree or disagree that assessments should be fundamentally about preparing students for the workplace, Jessica, Lijuan and Devendra wish to be challenged by their university experience. In the terms of the pragmatic sociology of critique, whether students wish to foreground industrial values or not, they here go beyond individualist self-interest to ask broader questions about the right thing to assess for in a university assignment.

Group-work as the fostering of friendships? Domestic worth and the question of individualism

Above, we discussed the development of team-working skills through group-work in relation to industrial values: the fostering of work-ready attributes. For a number of students, however, academics’ intentions when seeking to develop team-working skills were not conceived of in this industrial way. Rather, it was in relation to domestic values that group-work was discussed: that is, the fostering of friendships and warm, collaborative relationships. Here, the experience of simply doing work with others was presented by students as the ultimate aim for academics. Whether or not sociability is, in fact, academics’ aim is not our focus here; rather, in this section we will concentrate on how students conceived of domestic values within higher education, and the means by which students questioned the appropriateness of such values within assessment. Just as, above, students engaged with industrial values in complex ways that might challenge the idea that they have become consumerist, in this case it is the presentation of students as individualist that is contested.

The concentration on such domestic values probably relates to the fact that these students were studying the liberal arts and therefore had fewer shared classes, and what they perceived as a weaker cohort identity, than friends studying other degrees. Natasha, a second-year student at an old university, appreciated how her department worked hard to create community and a cohort identity that might otherwise be lacking. The only time that she mentioned group-work was as part of a list in response to my question about what the department did to create this identity:

We have core lectures together once a week, and I mean that’s only once a week, but in the first year we had group projects which made sure we met a lot of other people in those groups. And there are a lot of events that the [. . .] liberal arts department put on.

Many of these students, however, drew attention to a distinction between domestic values of inter-personal warmth and collaboration as by-products of group-work, and taking them to be the main goal of an assessment. (On the importance of by-products, or incidental outcomes, of assessment see Katznelson et al., 2001.) This distinction between explicit, fundamental aims and favourable by-products is an important way in which students sought to disentangle complex goals and isolate core assessment values. Lotte was broadly positive about the experience of group-work, but nonetheless also sought to disentangle sociability as a by-product from the aim of the assessment: ‘Core modules are not there for the social contact, I think. It gives an opportunity but it shouldn’t serve that purpose’. The development of sociability may well be going on, and it may well be a good thing, but students nonetheless seek to disentangle this by-product from the specific aim of the assessment.

Devendra, as we have seen, was sceptical about group-work because it could be seen as the easy face of employability, and he went further than others in his critique of domestic values in assessment too. He discussed the idea, put forward by lecturers, that a key element of group-work tasks was interdisciplinary working, where students bring different sorts of expertise together to work on a problem. He, again, expressed scepticism, stressing that sociability seemed to be the real aim, brought in by the back door: ‘It was almost more getting you together, than actually bringing together the skills that you’re supposed to have developed across university’.

The question of the fair test is the question of what is a valid and appropriate thing to be measured here, in this specific context. Students do not resist ideas of collaboration and sociability at university in general: they resist the idea that this should be the aim for an assessed piece of work. In fact, students in interviews gave many examples of appreciating different sorts of intellectual collaboration, and indeed of academics finding students ‘too collaborative’. Students talked approvingly about collaboration as appropriate in some educational contexts (small-group discussions, voluntary study groups, individual dissertation supervision), demonstrating that they were not resistant to it in general, but rather sought to disentangle when it is appropriate from when it is not. Indeed, dissertation supervision is a quite strictly educational model of collaboration, with no immediately obvious correlate in the average workplace. It is in an inspirational mode (that is, ‘for its own sake’ rather than focused on workplace preparation or another external goal), but is simultaneously collaborative.

Student Will thought that students could actually be too collaborative, disappointing academics who prized contestation in class. When discussing one lecturer’s fondness for in-class debate (a competitive picture of university life stressing individualist contestation), he noted that competition was quite appropriate but that students were too collaborative to do it:

When you’ve got people in a room, a lot of people just wouldn’t start arguing with each other, God bless them. They wouldn’t start defending their own stakeholders: they couldn’t do the role playing, where they would actually consider their interests. So they’d learn all the details as to what their interests were, but they wouldn’t then try and map out how they would chat to each other and try and get their best. So when you get politicians, scientists and journalists in a room, with different agendas, to create an output, they’ll all just agree immediately rather than fight their own corner.

Will’s example of an in-class debate where students could not be shaken out of their collaborative mindsets, like other students’ approving accounts of dissertation supervision as collaborative, demonstrates that students did not resist collaboration or the fostering of inter-personal relationships in general. They did not proclaim an individualist mindset. They instead sought to do the work of disentangling appropriate from inappropriate values in specific contexts, arguing that collaboration is sometimes appropriate at university and sometimes not.

Criticising, and reducing, complexity itself

In the preceding sections, we saw how students identified and questioned specific values that they thought academics meant to test for by setting group-work: industrial values about preparation for the workplace, and domestic ones about sociability. In the final findings section, we turn to a more general critique that students made about the complexity of assessment, with each assessment containing various constituent parts, and multiple if not competing aims. Again, we can understand such critique as an attempt to disentangle an increasingly messy assessment picture, characterised by academics’ ever more overwrought additions of learning objectives and elements of assessment.

As we have seen, a focus on the skills learned through group-work means a shift in concentration away from the product (the essay, the presentation) to the process of producing that product. In their desire to move students away from a focus on the product and toward the process, academics sometimes devise additional elements of assessment that explicitly ask students to reflect on the process itself. This might include reflective essays on how well the group worked together, or on an individual’s own learning process through the task. The group presentation, report or essay is the evidence we have – it is the product – but it does not tell us how we ought to interpret it. As a product, it does not tell us about the process of production. In itself, it will not show us whether people ‘worked well in a team’, much less whether they learnt new team-working skills through this process that they did not have before.

Paradoxically, however, these reflective documents are also new assessment products, or written pieces of work that will be handed in to teachers even if they do not constitute part of the assessment (though they often do). Thus, if these reflections were mentioned by students at all, this was always in passing as another product of assessment. First-year student Lotte gave me a list of the different elements of a group-work assessment on her core module:

But the whole group part was more like collecting or, like, asking people if we could interview them, or doing research about that. Also we had to make a video diary about our collaboration process: about basically the whole process behind it. And then the second one was making a group proposal.

No student talked about what the pedagogical purpose of these reflections on process might be.

In addition, a number of students talked about diffuse or unclear aims when it came to what the purpose of group-work in general was supposed to be. Adding in more and more learning objectives to an assessment could add to students’ confusion, even if the intention was to move students’ focus from the product to the learning process. A number of students noted that group-work assessments could be heavy on multiple learning aims while light on explicit instructions. First-year student Alina noted some of the challenges here:

It was definitely difficult to do, especially in so few words, to really – because you had to – obviously there was no requirement as to what kind of reading you had to include, so it was kind of difficult to sort of get it together into something that answered the question and that also related appropriately to all the different requirements.

From a product point of view, we might expect that answering the set question was the main aim of the assessment. But Alina notes that there were a number of other requirements to think about beyond the mere answering of the question.

One strategy employed by teachers to manage some of the problems thrown up by group-work already discussed is to suggest a specific division of work: for instance, that each student write a certain number of words before the group come back together to edit. Some academics require signed agreements about this division of labour before work on the task begins, or ask students to reflect at the end on whether their peers pulled their weight. The approach is thought to help with the problem of free-riders (Maiden and Perry, 2011), and also to help students understand in a more concrete way what collaboration might look like. This is in response to student complaints that instructions about group-work are often vague, as exemplified by interviewee Will’s words: ‘They sort of threw us into the deep sea for a lot of it’.

As we have just seen, first-year student Alina talked about the challenges of meeting varied learning objectives in group-work whilst still being mindful of the written piece of work, or product. She later discussed a different group assignment where each individual student was expected to write a short piece individually, before working as a group to ‘connect these three objects with, like, a common introduction and conclusion, to sort of make it more cohesive’.

Alina:

And we had to do all of that in a thousand words. It killed me.

Interviewer:

Complex, yeah. Did you see the value of it when you’d done it? Do you think you learned from it?

Alina:

I guess so but, like, that one especially is really frustrating for me. Like, I could’ve done so much better with a, like, five hundred words more.

Interviewer:

Okay.

Alina:

It got to the point where it was just, like, this is not – like, I just want to do this properly, and I don’t have the space and time to do it.

Alina begins collectively (‘we had to’) but then focuses on the individual element (‘I could’ve done . . .’) and what she was (not) able to achieve in the small part over which she had personal control. This may suggest that the aim to foster collaboration has failed. However, a different interpretation is that a clear (and often in fact enforced) division of labour reintroduces individualism as a value at the very moment that collectivism is being encouraged. Because it stresses that the group is in fact made up of individuals, this approach often feeds students’ frustrations, because it reattaches them to their own, individual piece of work. Alina has been reminded about the importance of the product, of the need to ‘do this properly’, much like Jessica’s concern with the final product’s ‘quality’. It is a version of collaboration that, far from resisting individualism, in fact entangles it back in.

For a number of students, the frustration of group-work is, then, related to what they can and cannot control. Lotte explained how difficult it was to be reliant on other students to do their part. It is a version of collaboration where everyone must achieve their clearly demarcated, individual goals, as she explained:

And that was a bit more challenging because everybody really just had to really work together and – how am I going to phrase this? Basically we were dependent on each other: what the one person wrote was basically a basis for what the other people were going to write, so you were really dependent on each other.

The individualist notion of collaboration as an equal division of labour stresses the importance of what I can control and what I cannot. A pre-declaration of labour division (or an incitement to inform on one’s peers after the fact) rests on these ideas of individual responsibility, and of what I can and cannot control. Lotte, like Alina, is saying that in the context of an assessment, control is an important part of making it a fair test. If there are aspects outside of my control, then why do they affect my grade?

The extracts in this section draw attention to the entanglement of individualism and collaboration within assessment. Academics’ attempts to deal with these paradoxical relations include agreements about who will do which part of the work, forms that report on who has done which part of the work, and a proliferation of learning objectives. Yet rather than clarifying matters, such attempts tend to deepen the entanglement, and the complexity. Students, on the other hand, seek a disentanglement.

Discussion

The comments from students about group-work in this article are, for the most part, gentle. Comments were made in passing, in the context of discussing something else. Critical points were made lightly, and were often good-humoured. But much can be learned, nonetheless, by treating these sometimes throw-away comments as critique. Expanding our understanding of critique to include the everyday, the incidental and the indirect allows us to expand, in turn, our sense of others as serious interlocuters. This is especially important in an unequal power relationship, as that between academics and students, where it can be easy for the former to assume a lack of seriousness or engagement in the latter.

Understanding the comments from students in this article as critique means making a distinction between critique and complaint. While complaint is a mere expression of personal unhappiness with my lot, critique entails attending to questions of fairness that go beyond my specific case. As distinct from making a complaint, when we offer a critique we ask three questions that build upon each other. Firstly, what is being valued here? Secondly, is that worth being measured correctly? And thirdly, is that the right sort of thing to value here at all?

In this context, students begin by asking what teachers mean to assess for when they set group-work assessments. This can helpfully be framed as the question of which values are established by the setting of assessment by group-work. In the examples above, students identified industrial values (preparation for work) and domestic values (friendship-forming and collaboration) as what they thought academics meant to test for. Our interest here is not in whether students are right or wrong to identify these as academics’ values, but in establishing that these are the values identified by students.

Students then ask whether group-work assessments do, in fact, measure that thing well. When students answer this question in the negative, they can be said to make a corrective critique. The point is not to challenge the appropriateness of the value identified to the context, but only to challenge how well the task set measures that value. For instance, Devendra was happy to be assessed for his workplace-readiness but thought that group-work itself was an ‘easy’ way to ‘sell’ the degree as being about employability to students and employers, rather than a rigorous way to develop true employability, as he saw it.

Finally, students may ask whether that value was the right thing to assess for at all. Here they are launching a radical critique, because they more fundamentally question the very terms by which an assessment has been set. Jessica, for instance, wished to re-focus academics’ attention on to the product of assessment (talking about ‘quality’ work she wished to produce), and away from the move toward a process focus that both industrial and domestic values reinforce. A focus on a good quality academic product can be understood as a turning back to inspirational educational values: producing a good academic object is a good ‘in itself’, without need for external validation by reference to the accumulation of skills. Students’ values need not be those associated with radical education to be conceived of as radical critique in this sense.

Far from mere individualist complaint, students’ resistance to group-work should be seen as pointing toward some of the paradoxes that inhabit higher education today. Students are expected to be other-focused and collaborative, but this is because these are the skills needed to succeed on the competitive job market. Students should not be individualistic, yet they should write an agreement in advance of conducting group-work that itemises which student will do which individual task.

One illustrative paradox is the problem of free riding: an intentional decision to let other people do the work for you, which some group-work scholarship seeks to solve (see, for instance, Maiden and Perry, 2011). Our sense that free riding is a problem seems to relate to ideas that we have about the importance of everybody taking individual responsibility within a team. And yet in their criticism of students’ resistance to group-work, educators often consider students’ greatest barrier to be that they are too individualistic. If we really thought we were aiming to temper students’ individualism through group-work, why work so hard to impress upon them the importance of individual responsibility at the same time?

Far from facing such paradoxes with a kind of playful, post-modern indifference, students begin the serious work of de-paradoxicalising (Mangez and Vanden Broeck, 2020). Students seek to reduce the complex tangle of collectivist and individualist, industrial and domestic values they experience (Biesta, 2010a) by asking critical questions about the correct sort of value that an educational assessment should be testing for. They are trying to disentangle the compacted values in the university that they are consistently asked to swallow wholesale: to ask whether this is the right value here.

By contrast, some students’ descriptions of academics’ actions (in designing and adapting assessments) suggest that they perceive teachers as adding in greater and greater complexity rather than seeking to reduce it. Their sense is that academics continually obscure these paradoxes by adding in more and more paradoxical elements as if we could, eventually, crack the whole nut (Ecclestone, 2002). Reflective essays about the process of learning to work in a team, or reports about who has done this or that part of the work; lengthier and lengthier sets of learning objectives that somehow manage to say less and less – all of this rests on a belief that we don’t have enough stuff. By contrast, for the students in this study, the problem is quite the opposite – and the role of educators is to help with reducing complexity. Thus, students criticise teachers for obscuring rather than bringing to light the difficulties that both students and academics face in thinking about what education, and assessment, are for.

Similarly, group-work is used as a type of assessment because it supposedly mimics the workplace; yet workplaces do not generally ask employees to sign agreements about what work they will each do at the beginning of each new project, nor to inform on colleagues who did not pull their weight at the end. (Indeed, the colleague who did the latter may be felt to be insufficiently adult, since informing on others to one’s superiors is encouraged in schools but not at work.) In any number of ways, higher education is not work – for instance because of education’s narrow focus on disjointed tasks rather than the broader sense of purpose that must normally be borne in mind in employment (Eiríksdóttir and Rosvall, 2019). In our keenness to ape the workplace (‘real-world learning’) we gloss over the collision of industrial and inspirational values rather than helping students to disentangle them.

Students were by no means unambiguously negative about group-work, and tended to caveat their reservations (‘I mean, I liked it but . . .’; ‘It was fun as well but . . .’). Students sometimes bracketed their complaints with jocular notes about their own lack of knowledge, or the legitimacy even to raise such issues at all. (As student Will put it, ‘I’d really like to caveat that I’m not an expert in pedagogy. I can’t even pronounce it’.) This humility shows us that rather than grand claims about educational values in general, students sought to bring our gaze downward to the everydayness of a particular case.

Conclusion

As Ahmed (2015) has pointed out, lecturers tend to call students ‘consumerist’ when what students want is not the same as what lecturers want on their behalf. All conversations, but especially ones where the power difference is so stark, require better faith as a starting point than this. The idea of disentangling values developed from the pragmatic sociology of critique and presented in this article can be an initial jumping off point for beginning this work.

In the extracts from interviews presented in this article, students neither make consumerist demands (‘Give me what I want’), nor air personal grievances (‘I should have received this mark’), nor talk in general terms (‘collaboration, or employability, or sociability are things I don’t value’). Instead, I have argued, they offer critique. And so, while this article is specifically about students’ purported problems of consumerism and individualism, and academics’ attempts to remedy them, it also presents a much broader argument for the extension of our understanding of critique.

The approach taken in this article deliberately does not ask who gets to decide in the end what form the assessment will take, but focuses instead on the existence of its critique. For some, this amounts to pragmatic sociology’s lack of attention to power, and its artificial levelling out of the capacity of different actors’ critiques to initiate change (see, for instance, Atkinson, 2020). Undoubtedly, the power difference within higher education means that students must do the test that the lecturer sets, and doing something else altogether as a sort of protest is not really a live option. Yet I contend that this does not mean that the only useful question for critical sociology is, ‘How do those with power continue to exert it?’ Equally valid are questions about how the relatively powerless continue to challenge the powerful.