From Marks to Metrics: Mapping Data Migration in Higher Education Regulation

This research in progress examines the mechanisms by which assessment judgements migrate through higher education in England and Wales regulatory infrastructure to become the gap metrics used to rank institutions.

Moving beyond metaphorical conceptualisations of data flows, I trace specific processes of replication, transformation, and proliferation that transform subjective academic judgments into regulatory compliance targets and sector benchmarks.

As these data migrate through regulatory systems, individual marks become degree classifications; aggregated by ethnicity, they become 'awarding gaps'regulatory benchmarking transforms them into performance indicators; integrated into dashboards they shape discussions of institutional racism; incorporated into plans, they become targets requiring intervention. Each migration transforms the data, generating multiple simultaneous incarnations for use in policy and decision-making.

I map this migration process at a single institution, tracing how individual marks transform as they move from pedagogical contexts into regulatory infrastructure. This mapping reveals what is added and lost at each migration point: the technical decisions that progressively sever metrics from the assessment practices, curricular contexts, and structural conditions that generated them.

This infrastructure makes inequality hypervisible through metrics while paradoxically constraining intervention by severing metrics from their generative practices. Once assessment data complete their migration through successive abstractions, awarding gaps circulate as decontextualised evidence of institutional failure – stripped of the pedagogical, curricular, and structural information needed to inform transformative action.

This empirical analysis of data mobilities in action reveals how migration mechanisms themselves can prevent the transformative outcomes regulatory infrastructure claims to pursue.