Higher education is commonly portrayed as a transitional space where students not only learn certain skills but also become someone new. The ‘ontological turn’ in higher education research has shed light on how such processes of being and becoming do not occur in the abstract, but take place in the day-to-day activities of teaching and learning (Barnett & Coate, 2004; Dall’Alba & Barnacle, 2007; Zembylas, 2017). In this study, we explore assessment as a particularly powerful institutional practice in shaping how students are ‘known’ in higher education – and know themselves – as more or less capable future professionals. Assessment is often portrayed as a powerful practice in shaping student learning, yet it also shapes students themselves (Godfrey-Faussett & Baird, 2025). We focus particularly on how assessment constructs the very notion of ‘ability’ it seeks to measure.

Our starting point is that assessment serves not only a pedagogical function, whether summative or formative, but also an ontological one. We approach the questions of self and identity through a cultural approach that recognises the role of assessment practices in shaping how students become ‘known’ within institutional frameworks of practice. We draw on the sociology of Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne (1995, 2006) in conceptualising ‘the self’ as a dynamic relationship that emerges as people become known in culturally and historically constituted discursive frameworks of practice. In our study, we generate knowledge about the self as a cultural product through spoken narratives. Focusing on students’ identity narratives – stories about who they are as more or less capable students – we wish to better understand the role that assessment plays within these narratives. For, “narratives do not merely describe what someone does in the world but what the world does to that someone.” (Mattingly, 1998, p. 8) We are particularly interested in how assessment shapes cultural conceptions of ‘ability’ and ‘able students’: what kinds of institutional frameworks of practice are organised to construct ‘abilities’ and how such ‘abilities’ then become attached to students’ understanding of who they are.

What is already known about how assessment shapes students within the higher education institution? Perhaps most notably, assessment and grades are directly related to future prospects and life opportunities, and, in doing so, regulate who students are, are becoming, and can become (Reay & William, 1999). Yet beyond such overt mechanisms, assessment also shapes potential, normal and ideal ideas of ‘being a student’ in more hidden ways. This has been noted by critical scholarship, which has often claimed that assessment and grading systems foster competitive, customer-oriented and neoliberal student bodies (see Raaper, 2016). On the other hand, higher education institutions often wish to harness assessment to shape students into particular kinds of future professionals. For example, much of the work on ‘professional identities’ has explored how assessment can help students become the unique selves they aspire to be (see the review by Nieminen, 2025).

Yet, despite emergent interest in how assessment shapes the stories students tell about themselves, what remains undertheorised is the ontological mechanisms by which assessment practices constitute ‘abilities’ and ‘able students’. Clearly, assessment sets the parameters for how we talk and think about ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in higher education; high grades denote success, failing courses denotes failure, and so forth. But how exactly does assessment organise ‘success’ and ‘failure’? To explore this question, we conducted an empirical analysis of nine university students’ identity narratives. We focus on students with learning disabilities and mental health issues, as it is these students whose ways of knowing and being have historically been marked as ‘disabilities’ – the opposite of abilities (Nieminen, 2023). 

To generate knowledge about students’ stories about who they are in this world with respect to their ‘abilities’, and the role of assessment therein, we analysed nine Finnish university students’ ‘ability narratives’. The origins of the project are in a postdoctoral research project that aimed to understand how assessment marginalises disabled students (Nieminen, 2023). In this project, nine students with various learning disabilities and mental health issues were interviewed about their experiences of assessment and disability-related assessment adjustments (e.g., additional time in examinations). These interviews were narrative in nature, meaning that students were actively asked to generate stories about ‘who they are’ (rather than what they do) with respect to assessment. We analyse these nine interviews using a culturally oriented narrative analysis. We do not see ‘disability’ (and ‘ability’ for that matter) as a stable identity category, but instead as a cultural achievement that requires careful coordination across cultural practices, including disability advisors, assessment designers, medical diagnosis documents, and inclusive higher education policies (following McDermott & Varenne, 1995, 2006). Based on students’ ‘ability narratives’ of who they are and what they can do in assessment, we aimed to understand the narrative boundaries that assessment sets for talking and thinking about these matters. Our analysis does not focus on students’ perspectives on ‘ability’ and ‘success’ as in many earlier studies (notably Godfrey-Faussett & Baird, 2025), but instead sheds light on how ability is organised around assessment as a cultural practice. Typically, such narrative work has focused on the voices of ‘winners’ such as high-achieving students (e.g., Yu & Luo, 2025), yet we argue that it is necessary to generate new theorisations based on the ‘neglected cases’ of those whose abilities and identities have been placed into the margins of higher education, such as indeed students with disabilities (following Krause, 2024). In practice, we analysed each student's individual ability narrative, following the guidelines for cultural analysis by McDermott and Varenne (1995, 2006). We then conducted a synthesis of these nine narratives by asking: What is assessment doing to these students? How does assessment organise these students with respect to ‘ability’?

Our preliminary analysis has uncovered that assessment shapes students’ ability narratives in three metaphorical ways: - Assessment as a silo: assessment separates students ontologically from each other and produces ‘ability’ as an individualistic attribute - Assessment as a mould: assessment standardised ‘ability’ by organising it around carefully standardised, predetermined notions of success (e.g., test scores) - Assessment as a ladder: assessment positions individuals into hierarchical relationships with each other, organising success and failure around competition Within the cultural framework of ‘being a student’ in assessment, our nine participants organised their identity narratives around notions of individual failure in standardised assessments, particularly examinations. They described being ‘behind’ other students with higher grade point average scores. We conclude that, in higher education, assessment can be seen as a cultural apparatus heavily invested in failure (McDermott & Varenne, 2006, p. 11). We call for further conceptual attention to how assessment sets the boundaries for being an ‘able’, ‘normal’ and ‘ideal’ student within culturally organised frameworks of ‘ability’. We see a political dimension in such ontological work, following Zembylas (2017), as that line of inquiry would encourage higher education scholars to critically ask whether the ‘work that assessment does’ to shape students aligns with the stated purposes of the university.

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