Governing Through Examinations: High-Stakes Assessment as Educational Governance

High-stakes national examinations persist despite decades of evidence that their consequences exceed measurement. This article reads Bangladesh’s Secondary School Certificate and Higher Secondary Certificate examinations through Weber’s bureaucratic rationalisation, Foucault’s disciplinary power, and Freire’s critical pedagogy, with Bourdieu and Passeron’s reproduction theory where the argument turns to inequality. It argues that these examinations govern simultaneously as bureaucratic technologies, surveillance mechanisms, and pedagogical structures, and that because these processes reinforce one another, content-focused reform is repeatedly absorbed rather than realised. The article reconceptualises examinations as technologies of governance and draws out the consequences for classroom practice and teacher professional learning.