  It is widely agreed that exams must be fair; yet what this exactly means is
not made clear. One may mean fairness of treatment, but this merely propagates
the fairness or unfairness of pre-existing rules. Fairness of opportunity on
the other hand necessarily leads to identical grades for everyone, which
clearly makes it inapplicable. Neither view is helpful to make decisions on
competing claims: fairness of treatment ignores the problem and fairness of
opportunity holds all claims to be equally valid. To escape this deadlock one
needs an external criterion to replace fairness viewed as student-student
comparison.
  Keywords: assessment; bias; engineering education; examinations; grading;
justice; tests
