Grading practices: The construction and use of background knowledge in evaluative decision-making

Abstract

Personnel in "people-processing" settings (Hasenfeld, 1972) are frequently asked to make evaluative decisions regarding clients who seek, use or are subjected to their services. Organizations like the police, courts, clinics, social service agencies, and myriad others produce ratings, judgments and diagnoses in order to determine appropriate organizational responses. Perhaps prototypic in this regard are educational institutions: schools must constantly evaluat e , classify and differentiate between students in order to monitor their progress and make placement decisions. Educators conscientiously espouse the need for using fair, accurate and unbiased decision-making procedures. To that end, special methods of evaluation have been widely instituted to safeguard against decisions that might be unsystematically derived or tainted by emotion or predisposition. In some sense, the grading practices that evolve in educational settings doing "standardized" evaluation are suggestive of evaluation methods implemented in other settings that attempt to decontextualize and systematize decision-making. These attempts to control decision-making assume, fundamentally, that it is possible, as well as advisable to prevent evaluators' use of particularized background knowledge of cases being evaluated in order to produce "objective" ratings.