The Mystery of Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation presents two perspectives on learners. One sees learners within a process such that they do not even know the extent of the distance they must travel to achieve their outcomes. This perspective views learners like children who need external drivers to guide their journey. The other sees learners on a mission—they know how far they have travelled and how much distance still remains. This perspective views learners like responsible and aware adults who can formulate strategies responsive to their constantly evolving learning needs.
Consider elevator systems in large buildings. You press a button and wait. The car arrives, doors open, you travel. But dispatch algorithms continuously optimise across dozens of concurrent requests, predicting traffic patterns based on time of day, balancing wait times against energy costs, deciding which car serves which floor. You experience smooth vertical transport; you never access the computational choreography making thousands of micro-decisions each minute. The interface remains simple whilst the actual intelligence behind it remains invisible.
Neither evaluative perspective is entirely true for most learners. A hybrid perspective must be applied. Some measure of transparency and some measure of authoritative guidance from beyond the learner’s horizon—both are needed to allow most learners to journey effectively. Like stage directions in theatre scripts, certain evaluation structures remain invisible to participants whilst shaping their experience entirely. The question becomes: which elements belong in the visible script, and which belong in the lighting booth known only to technicians?
Evaluation paradigms are rarely revised as they should be. There persists a belief that evaluating different people differently is a solved problem requiring no urgent attention. Yet the capacity educators, administration and management have in articulating necessary milestones—and why learners must cross them—remains very inconsistent. This inconsistency directly shapes the opacity of all learning journeys they design.
When institutions fail to articulate milestones, learners cannot calibrate their own progress. When institutions over-articulate, learners lose capacity for self-navigation. The craft lies in knowing which elements to illuminate and which to keep backstage. Does knowing exactly what’s expected help you navigate, or does visibility sometimes constrain the unexpected discoveries that genuine learning produces?