Better judgement: What does training assessors about judgement biases deliver?

Background: Human judgement is necessary when assessing competence but human judgement is subject to biases. Biases are not prejudices, but misrepresentations in the assessor’s mind of what occurred. The use of biases is natural and ‘hard-wired’ so they cannot be trained out but the assessor can be
trained to manage them.
Summary of Work: A training program supporting awareness raising about nine biases was developed utilising online mini-lectures, acted video cases, reallife videos and workshop activities. Ten workshops were held with 292 participants from universities in Australia and Europe. Open questions feedback was collected and an inductive thematic analysis was conducted.
Summary of Results: The themes identified from the feedback were: the empowering of the assessor through the provision of a language; the ability to translate the workshop content to the participants’ own future practice; the participants' conceptualization of how a variety of measures can be used to flexibly manage biases, rather than seeking for a one-size-fits-all; and the need to explore issues of
bias in assessment.
Discussion: Raising awareness enables assessors to recognise and manage biases in their judgement and decision making. This understanding enables them to more consciously choose what to do with the
assessment information. It also this enables them to justify and articulate their judgements and decisions which leads to both more credible judgements and the empowerment of the assessors.
Conclusion: Our analysis of the data collected so far indicates that the language that people acquire through the training is what is most empowering – both in terms of their judgement and in terms of teaching teams being able to discuss assessment.
Take Home Messages: Supporting examiners to be more aware of the biases that may influence their judgements makes the judgement process more conscious, adding credibility and defensibility to their judgements.