Assessment or Surveillance? Panopticism and Higher Education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we explore Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and consider its possible contribution to understanding more fully the impact of current assessment protocols and practices within higher education. More pointedly, we ask the following question: Are the plethora of assessment practices within higher education actually designed to improve student academic experience, or are they instead mechanisms of surveillance intended to control, dominate and invoke paranoia among university workers? In response to this question, we argue that the prevailing preoccupation with assessment in U.S. universities is motivated less by a genuine desire to enhance the actual academic experience of students than it is to offer hegemonic interests a psychological instrument of control to eliminate potential dissent over neo-liberal and managerial class imposed policies. To illustrate our central claim, we first review some general details of Bentham’s panopticon. Secondly, we briefly discuss Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon and consider his accompanying postulate on the tendency of individuals to self-regulate their behavior according to externally imposed and monitored expectations. We also examine in greater depth the relationship between the panopticon and the Lacanian gaze, with a focus on considering the latter’s psychological impact. Finally, we contend that the prevailing obsession with assessment in universities is a mechanism of institutional control that hinders rather than enhances the academic quality of contemporary higher education by limiting the scope of academic dialogue, social imagination and democratic structural critique.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it