Do we need a single standard of value for institutional assessment? An essay response to Asao Inoue's “community-based assessment pedagogy”

Inoue [Inoue, A. B. (2005). Community-based assessment pedagogy. Assesing Writing: An International Journal, 3, 208–238] sets up a radically experimental writing class as a kind of laboratory of assessment. He seeks to avoid the standard situation where a teacher unilaterally assesses and grades student writing, using only his or her own criteria or standard. His premise is that value in writing is socially constructed, and so he gets students to enact a social, communal process to work out the criteria for effective writing. In this way he gets students to take full responsibility for assessing and even grading each other.But when he requires his students to agree on a single model of good writing (a “rubric” with various dimensions), I think he misunderstands how value is actually socially constructed. In fact we live in a world with various models of good or effective writing. Given, however, that he is working in an institutional setting, his approach seems readily understandable. How can feedback be coherent or final grades be fair if they are based on multiple and competing models of goodness? This sounds like a rhetorical question, but in fact I use this essay to argue that it is not only feasible but desirable to use multiple models of value in an institutional setting.