Project SCHOOL

The Objectification of Assessments
in the Institutional Categorization of Students
at the Primary and Secondary Levels

This sub-project focuses on an institution that works to consolidate its human differentiations. Schools place their levels of performance (grades) under three conditions that ensure they are comparable: age equality (in classes), “aptitude classes” (school types), and indifference to other differentiations (such as sex). This project asks how this practice of classification is performed in concrete terms and how schools work on the objectivity of their contingent assessments of performance classes. Among other things, it follows the interactive perpetuation of assessments in class and in faculties, the legitimation of performance classes by means of aptitude theories, the material solidification of grades by means of report cards, and their habitual sedimentation in the self-image of students.