In 2010–2012 the new assessment system was officially introduced into Estonian formal education. In order to understand how fundamental a cultural change this was for Estonian society, this study presents the discourses represented in the memoirs of the former students who got their assessment experience between the 1960s and the 1980s. The official Soviet assessment system was introduced into Estonian education in the 1950s. Although the Estonian pedagogical literature in the 1960s – 1980s was pedagogically comprehensive, the 48 recollections gathered for this study repeatedly represented discourses that can be found from the assessment norms introduced in the 1950s: counting mistakes, public humiliation, teacher’s injustice or assessment that was meant to punish for improper behaviour.
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