This symposium is related to the project Pupils stories about grades - a study of pupils´ experiences of getting grades and of conducting national tests in grade six, funded by the Swedish Research council. 

For this symposium, we present four contributions, of which two are related to students’ stories about grading, and two to national testing. The purpose of the symposium is to present preliminary findings related to issues of pupils’ feelings, identity and agency on the one hand, and what their stories indicate in relation to issues of equity on the other. Data for the projects are based on interviews with pupils and on video-recordings. Both types of data have been utilised for the contributions to this symposium. In three of the contributions, the main focus is on aspects of pupils’ identities and agency as they appear in the stories produced during the interviews or in video-recordings and further what these can tell about pupils as actors in an assessment system – not only as individuals being assessed. The fourth contribution focuses on ethical issues that can be identified in pupils’ narratives about national tests and discusses them as an aspect produced by the Swedish assessment system. The symposium contributes to the few Nordic studies there are that address students’ perspectives on assessment in school and further relates them to ethical issues.