Ethics of Academic Selection

In this chapter, I critically review various perspectives on educational justice, and their implications for academic selection. I argue that most of the extant literature on educational justice and academic selection focuses on selection by any means, and rather less attention has been accorded to the educational justice implications of academic selection predicated on high stakes tests. To address this gap in the literature, I demonstrate how some of the consequences of selection (see Chap. 5), together with the philosophical limitations of educational assessment (articulated in Chap. 2), mean that academic selection via high stakes tests can lead to the harmful treatment of some students. More specifically, I argue that academic selection by any means has the potential to precipitate epistemic harms for some young people in the form of epistemic disadvantage or epistemic injustice.