Designing the perfect assessment system, part 3

Daisy Christiodoulou

There are no solutions, only trade-offs

One of the arguments I make is that there are quite a few overlaps between the kind of decision-making needed in education and assessment, and that required by football referees.

One important concept that’s relevant to both is the idea of trade-offs. For years, before VAR was introduced, we would hear football fans and players complain about bad refereeing decisions. The phrase you’d hear a lot was “we just want more right decisions”, and that was the justification for introducing technological support to referees.
Except, of course, within just a few games of VAR’s introduction, we suddenly realised that whilst we wanted “more right decisions”, we wanted a lot of other things too, some of which we maybe hadn’t even realised were important. Rio Ferdinand put this well back in 2019, when he argued that VAR’s quest for more right decisions was compromising another crucially important part of football – its simplicity.