Humanising Assessment in South African Higher Education: Insights from the Literature and Authors' Reflections

Abstract

Humanised assessment is the process of aligning and implanting the elements of humans into gauging learners’ academic and non-academic endeavours. Given the surge in curriculum and pedagogy decolonisation, Africanisation, and humanisation discourse, an inquiry needs to be focused on humanising the assessment process. Therefore, this study fills the literature gap by providing insights on humanised assessment in South African higher education. The study explored the authors' perceptions and literature evidence on assessment in South African Higher education, how humanising the South African higher education assessment is, the most adopted assessment practices in South African higher education, and how assessment can be further humanised in South African higher education institutions. The critical interpretive synthesis methodology was utilised for the study, which combines evidence from the literature and the researchers’ views (involving bibliometric and documentary analysis methods) for synthesising evidence on the research subject). Findings indicate that assessment in South African higher education is perceived to be linguistically biased, unfriendly, and harsh to students’ personalities, learning desires, and choices; formative and interactive assessment are the most used approaches in South Africa; the COVID-19 pandemic has fostered the humanisation of the education process, including executing assessments that promote students' learning processes. Thus, putting a human face and voice into the assessment process and instruments enhances the “humanness” that qualifies as humanised assessment.