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Teachers are increasingly required to enact assessment policies in digitalised spaces, raising ethical issues of privacy and surveillance in the process. Yet, while policy enactment has been examined extensively, there remains research uncertainty around the ethical dimensions associated with assessment policy in digitalised settings. Drawing upon Ball et al.'s Typology of Policy Positions, and utilising Australian teachers' interviews, we illustrate how the policy positions of the latter were shaped by critical ethical incidents in digitalised conditions. We describe how teachers struggled to reconcile their ethical obligation to provide valid assessment outcomes with their duty of care, procedural institutional commitments, and the need to protect student privacy. To ensure 'ethical assessment' practices that best fulfil their obligations, the educators were not confined to one policy position, rather they moved across roles, also framed as moral recuperation mechanisms. Regulations to help facilitate policy enactments of 'ethical assessment' in digitalised contexts are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that powerful techniques to manipulate data, enabled by technological and economic developments, can be easily co-opted to serve the restrictive frameworks of hyper-controlling, managerial accountability that characterise current cultures of summative assessment in education. In response to these challenges, research is urgently needed to increase our understanding of the impact that assessments have on individuals and society. The paper concludes that social research ought to contribute to the identification of responses – educational, technological and political – that can minimise inequalities and potential abuses through the encouragement of data literacy across society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]