Assessment Autopsy Clinic

What participants gain

• Deconstruct assessment artifacts to identify embedded systemic biases
• Differentiate between assessing actual learning outcomes and assessing cultural compliance
• Apply root-cause analysis to skewed grading distributions

Materials needed

• Physical copies of participants' past assessments or rubrics
• A3 paper with pre-drawn Fishbone diagrams
• Red and green highlighters
• Post-mortem diagnostic worksheets
• Scissors and tape

How to run Assessment Autopsy Clinic, step by step

1. Set the 'clinical' tone by explaining that we are diagnosing the artifact, not the educator, to find systemic pathologies (5 min).
2. Instruct participants to silently review their assessment artifact and use a red highlighter to mark language that assumes specific cultural contexts (10 min).
3. Divide participants into 'clinical teams' of three to peer-review each other's highlighted artifacts (15 min).
4. Direct teams to transfer the identified issues onto the 'head' of the Fishbone diagram as the main problem statement (5 min).
5. Guide teams through the first two 'bones' (Language/Vocabulary and Format/Structure), brainstorming root causes for the bias (15 min).
6. Guide teams through the next two 'bones' (Evaluator Assumptions and Institutional Norms), digging deeper into systemic causes (15 min).
7. Instruct participants to use a green highlighter to mark areas on the original artifact that genuinely assess the core learning objective (10 min).
8. Ask teams to physically cut out the 'green' sections and tape them to a new sheet, visually representing the core assessment stripped of biased framing (10 min).
9. Facilitate a full-room debrief on the most common root causes discovered in the institutional norms category (5 min).

Facilitator tips

• Maintain the 'autopsy' metaphor throughout to keep the analysis objective and clinical.
• Circulate actively during the fishbone mapping to push teams beyond superficial causes (e.g., ask 'Why 5 times').
• If a participant claims their assessment is completely objective (like math), challenge them to look at word problems or time-constraints.
• Encourage teams to be ruthless with the red highlighter; the goal is radical deconstruction.
• Manage time strictly during the peer review to ensure everyone's artifact gets equal attention.

Common challenges

• Participants forgot to bring an artifact - Have 3-4 generic, highly flawed sample rubrics available as backups.
• Resistance to peer critique - Enforce strict protocols where the artifact owner only listens during the initial 3 minutes of peer feedback.
• Getting stuck on surface-level grammar - Guide them toward structural issues like assumed prior knowledge or Eurocentric framing.
• Emotional distress over past impact on students - Validate the feeling, then channel it into the redesign action.

Running it virtually

Use Zoom breakout rooms with collaborative Google Docs. Participants paste their assessment text into a shared document, and peers use the 'suggesting' mode and comment features to perform the autopsy and root-cause analysis asynchronously within the time block.

Expected results

A deeply analyzed assessment artifact with identified points of structural bias and a mapped root-cause diagram showing how the bias manifested.

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