Developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students' work for their disciplines

After two decades, efforts to integrate the development and assessment of ‘graduate attributes’ into discipline curricula remain slow, uneven, and fraught with difficulties.  Scholars have identified political, cultural and practical reasons for academics’ resistance to this requirement, including ‘lack of ownership and shared understanding of how to teach and assess graduate attributes’ (Radloff et al., 2008). Along with Barrie (2007) and de la Harpe and David (2010), Radloff et al. (2008) have argued that ‘academic staff beliefs are critical and fundamental to any attempts at developing students’ graduate attributes’.This article suggests that, rather than trying to change these beliefs via top-down mandates to adopt institutional attributes, it may make sense instead to start from academics’ beliefs and see what attributes they suggest are actually integral to their cultures of enquiry. I reflect on such a process in the context of developing criteria and standards for assessing graduate ‘capabilities’ across the three years of a BA degree, in which a Faculty working party tried to tease out what we meant by ‘good writing’ into easily applicable criteria with authentic meaning(s) across our varied disciplines.