When Exams Meet Open Inquiry: The Hidden Clash Reshaping University Assessment

At a research-intensive university in Denmark, professors designed courses that asked students to do something unusual: act like researchers. They collected data, ran experiments, presented findings to peers and recorded podcasts documenting their scientific journeys. Yet when final assessments approached, something shifted. Students who had spent weeks immersed in the excitement of discovery suddenly began counting words for exam essays and asking precisely what was expected of them. Teachers watched carefully constructed atmospheres of curiosity collapse within days. A new study published in the journal Higher Education argues that this recurring pattern is not a failure of implementation, but the visible surface of a much deeper structural tension built into the modern university itself.

The study, conducted by Marie Larsen Ryberg of the University of Copenhagen and Mathilde Hjerrild Carlsen of Copenhagen Business School, draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork across a university-wide initiative to integrate research into teaching. The first author observed seven courses spanning the natural sciences, health sciences, social sciences, humanities and law, part of a larger project in which 54 courses were redesigned to connect research and teaching more closely. Through participant observation, ethnographic interviews during group work sessions, semi-structured interviews with teachers and focus group interviews with students, the researchers captured how academics and students experienced the relationship between research-based teaching processes and final assessment. What emerged was a consistent story of two incompatible ways of engaging colliding within the same course.

To interpret these experiences, the researchers turned to the sociology of regimes of engagement, a theoretical framework developed by French sociologist Laurent Thévenot. The framework distinguishes four ways humans engage with their surroundings: justification, planned action, familiarity and exploration. Each regime carries its own benefit, or good, and each requires a specific environment to support it. The regime of planned action offers the satisfaction of successfully executing a plan, projecting oneself into the future and working purposefully toward predetermined outcomes. This regime has become so pervasive in contemporary society that it can easily be mistaken for normal action, and it has been institutionalised in education through quality assurance systems and standardised assessment. The regime of exploration, by contrast, promises not certainty but the excitement of discovering the new, thriving on surprise and the pursuit of the unknown.

Across the courses studied, exams consistently emerged as a site of difficulty. Academics repeatedly identified examinations as unwelcome intrusions into processes where students were expected to engage in genuine research. Three food science professors who deliberately designed their course as an exam-free experiment explained that the main idea was for students to try collecting data, and that this would not work if students were told to act as students all the time, concerned with marks and passing. A laboratory science professor omitted standard examinations from her course design, noting in an evaluation report that preparing for exams may become the dominating goal, restricting creativity. In a social sciences course, a professor told inquiring students that exams were not what interested him most, and that the course was really about learning.

Teachers did not merely talk differently about assessment; they actively shaped their learning environments to invite exploration. In a law course, a professor opened the first seminar with an invigorating talk about the experimental status of the course itself, emphasising her hopes of creating more knowledge and perhaps changing attitudes, and encouraging an experimental and inspirational milieu. Even in a health sciences class of approximately 300 students conducting laboratory experiments, teachers cultivated excitement by emphasising that student work would contribute to a larger experiment. Students responded vividly to these atmospheres. One law student observed that in this course it felt more like people wanted to ask questions and be inspired, contrasting it with the normal programme where it is like your whole life depends on getting a high mark. Another student in a social sciences course said that unlike other courses, where considerable energy goes into deciphering learning goals and exam requirements, in this course you do not feel like you are thinking about the performance at all.

Yet these carefully composed atmospheres proved fragile. A humanities professor who had run weekly videoconference seminars with international researchers described how the sessions evolved into an ongoing conversation that students found extremely interesting, only for the atmosphere to deteriorate as the exam approached. Students started talking about the required number of words, and the professor concluded that the exam had been a tripwire and a disturbance. Students described similar dissonance. One student in a social sciences course recounted that when the exam period arrived, he had to make a plan but found it very unclear what was expected, describing a clash between the professor and the rigid system. Through the lens of engagement regimes, these moments reveal what happens when an environment built to sustain explorative engagement is confronted by institutional formats that invite planned action and strategised effort.

The analysis also exposes what is sacrificed when one regime dominates. When exploration prevails, students lose the certainty of executing a plan and the sense of fairness that standardised assessment promises. Standard exams embody established quality conventions linked to the regime of justification, guaranteeing justice through clear learning goals and institutional formats. Suspending students’ concern with evaluation therefore produces not only freedom but also confusion about assessment expectations and worry about being judged justly. Conversely, when planned action dominates, the excitement of discovery is sacrificed, and open inquiry gives way to surface strategies aimed at meeting predefined criteria. Neither arrangement is neutral; each delivers distinct goods while imposing distinct losses on the individuals navigating them.

Some teachers, however, demonstrated what Thévenot calls an art of composition: the skilful coordination between competing engagement regimes. In a biochemistry course, a professor replaced traditional exams with a comprehensive portfolio assessment in which students could pass through attendance and three presentations. Fourth-year students worked in groups on research projects in the teaching lab three days a week, presented findings to each other and to departmental colleagues in poster sessions, submitted a podcast documenting their process, and published their findings in a journal report. The professor explained that the team focused on evaluation relevant to a real research environment, where scientists present results to peers and reviewers and ideas are tested in broader settings. Students described the course as exciting and different, with one reflecting that because there was no exam, they were not thinking that they had nothing to show, even though the experiment had not gone as expected, because it had been a learning process in its own right.

Even this artful solution involved sacrifice. The portfolio format protected exploration and created sheltered moments for imagination, but it partially deprived students of the possibility of organising their work through transparent, predefined goals. Outcomes were not foreseeable, and some students threw themselves on the floor when experiments failed, while others said they had never felt so nervous. Because the environment was dominated by the expectation of discovering something new, students could reframe what would have counted as failure under planned action as genuine learning, but the underlying tension did not dissolve. The theory suggests that every compromise between engagement regimes necessarily sacrifices the good of one mode of engagement, leaving a residual strain that teachers must continually manage rather than permanently resolve.

The authors argue that these findings carry implications far beyond local assessment design. The clash between open-ended inquiry and standardised evaluation reflects the coexistence in modern universities of environments that dispose fundamentally different ways of engaging, each with distinct benefits and losses. A Humboldtian ideal of knowledge as perpetually unresolved sits alongside an equally enduring conception of learning as predictable and manageable, and research-based teaching sits precisely at this fault line. Strengthening the integration of research and teaching, the study contends, requires recognising the tensions between plural engagement regimes rather than treating assessment problems as technical alignment failures. Supporting educational quality, the researchers conclude, demands institutional environments that enable rather than constrain the delicate compositional work teachers and students undertake, treating shifts between exploration and assessment as tensions to compose around rather than perplexing surprises. The predicament of assessment in research-based teaching is therefore not a problem to be solved once and for all, but a perpetual challenge calling for continuous recognition and recomposition.

Subject of Research: Tensions between research-based teaching and standardised university assessment viewed through the sociology of regimes of engagement

Article Title: Research-based teaching and the predicament of assessment: rethinking evaluation challenges through the sociology of regimes of engagement

Article References: Ryberg, M. L., & Carlsen, M. H. (2026). Research-based teaching and the predicament of assessment: rethinking evaluation challenges through the sociology of regimes of engagement. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01765-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01765-4

Keywords: research-based teaching, assessment, regimes of engagement, exploration, planned action, higher education, ethnography, student engagement, university pedagogy, Humboldtian ideal, portfolio assessment, sociology of education