Making students visible: Transparency and the politics of digital assessment

This article examines how students understood and responded to transparency in digital assessment through a case study of Cadmus, a platform that embeds guidance within the assessment process while also making aspects of student activity visible to staff. Drawing on surveys, classroom discussion, and reflective analysis from a postgraduate politics module, the article shows that digital transparency is experienced in different ways. Some students valued the structure and guidance the platform provided. Others were uneasy about being made visible through it and felt constrained by the way it shaped their work. The article argues that these responses matter because digital assessment platforms do more than deliver instructions: they also shape how students experience authority and trust. Cadmus is therefore approached as a site where institutional values and power relations are encountered and questioned, rather than simply a neutral, technical instrument. The article concludes that educators should treat these moments of student unease and critique as opportunities for reflexive learning and should design digital assessment in ways that make platform politics discussable while foregrounding student agency and trust.