Judgement biases in assessment: for better or worse? (0286)

Human judgement is a necessary component of assessment but it is subject to judgement biases. Biases are not prejudices, instead, they are misrepresentations in the assessor’s mind of what occurred during the assessment exercise. The potential impact on grades implies that biases are bad and we should try to remove them, but should we and can we? Biases can be useful for alerting a person to an issue so biases may either enhance or hinder fair judgement in the real-world, complex environment of practice-based assessment. We have developed a training package to educate assessors about biases in order to empower them to articulately justify the decisions they make. This paper presents and analyses the purpose and outcomes of a training package for assessors called ‘Better Judgement’.