Assessments and Dark Objects or How to Index Pedagogic Intra-Activity in an Age of Large Language Models

This chapter proposes that assessments are not just tools for benchmarking, for advancement, or for gatekeeping but are onto-epistemic world-building practices in their own right. By examining binarity, we go directly to the new materialist notion of apparatus and how assessments are so much more in practice than descriptors to be performed to. They are world-making apparatuses. For pedagogies and curriculum that places being able to handle complexity and critically engage with notions of “existential risk” at their core, this becomes a vital aspect of rethinking education. Instead of arguing that assessments should be eliminated or radically altered, the chapter gives a real-life example of how approaching the inherent binarity of an assessment policy from an intra-active perspective allows for shifts within policy to be enacted. Shifts that prioritise assessing for complexity.