Assessment

Assessment is the collective name given to the family of formal examinations by which the Tower establishes the properties, limits, and standing of a subject that has been referred to it. The term is administrative rather than descriptive: no single Assessment exists, and the Concordance on Referral Procedure has twice declined to define one, noting in its fourth recension that "the word Assessment names a habit of the Tower rather than a thing within it" (Concordance on Referral Procedure, clause 9). In ordinary use the plural is preferred, and a subject is said to "go to Assessment" in the same way a parcel is said to go to the post.

Assessment is distinguished from measurement, inspection, and certification, though it frequently requires all three and is frequently mistaken for them by parties lodging a first referral. The distinction is procedural: a measurement yields a figure, an inspection yields a report, and an Assessment yields a standing — a determination of what the subject is to be called thereafter, and by whom.

Structure of the family

Assessments are not arranged in a hierarchy but in a schedule, and the schedule is not sequential. Roughly forty are in current use, of which eleven are mandatory for any referred subject and the remainder are convened as the subject's properties require. The mandatory eleven are convened in an order fixed by Concordance 14, which has been amended nine times and is observed in three incompatible versions depending on which scriptorium holds the working copy.

The principal mandatory Assessments are well documented elsewhere. The Initial Assessment is the first stage of nearly every procedure and is conducted by the Office of Preliminary Assessment, which also performs the Initial Screening antecedent to the Office of Volumetric Assessment's work. Substrate Assessment, Harmonic Assessment, and Coherence Assessment follow in an order that depends on the version of Concordance 14 in force. The Stabilization Assessment runs concurrently with none of them. The final and most granular phase of any complete procedure is the Volitional Assessment, administered by the Office of Volitional Assessment under the Manual of Volitional Assessment (337th Edition).

Beyond these, the schedule includes the Volumetric Assessment and its preceding Volumetric Survey, the Strain Assessment, the Durability Assessment and its predictive companion the Hypothetical Durability Assessment, and the Field Assessment, most of whose exercises are conducted at Central Field. The Rite of Silent Assessment is not, strictly speaking, an Assessment at all, and the Office of Preliminary Assessment has asked that it stop being counted as one.

The Referral Question

The most durable dispute in the Assessment literature concerns whether an Assessment may be said to begin before referral. Librarian Ospen Marrow, in the Marrow Commentary of 1189, held that Assessment begins "at the moment the subject is conceived of as assessable, which is to say before it is named and often before it exists" (Marrow Commentary, folio 44v). The opposing position, associated with the Office of Preliminary Assessment and set out in its Memorandum on the Commencement of Proceedings, is that nothing is under Assessment until a referral slip has been sealed, dated, and entered in the register, and that Marrow's view would make every object in the Tower permanently under Assessment, which the Office notes "it is not, and could not be staffed for."

The dispute is not academic. Subjects assessed under the Marrow reading accrue fees from the moment of conception; subjects assessed under the Office's reading accrue none until sealing. The Court of Concordant Claims ruled in 1402 that both readings were correct "in their respective registers" and that the question of which register applied was itself to be settled by Assessment. One hundred and six subjects are currently suspended at this stage.

"Where an Assessment has been convened, is being convened, or has been convened and abandoned without minute, the standing of the subject shall be recorded as pending, and shall remain so notwithstanding the conclusion of any proceeding concerning it."

— Third Concordance, Annex 7, the Protocols for Coherence Assessment

Floor 286 and the Winter of the Long Table

The administrative history of Assessment is largely a history of Floor 286, which has housed the Assessment Register since the floor was reassigned from Ceremonial Weights in the winter of 1311. The reassignment was poorly executed. The Register's index had been compiled against the Weights inventory, and for the first four years of its life every Assessment was filed under the mass of a comparable object. The error was discovered by a junior clerk, Hessa Vane, who noticed that the Durability Assessment of a stoneware jar had been entered at eleven pounds and the same jar's Strain Assessment at eleven pounds also, though the jar weighed six.

Vane's correction took nineteen years to ratify, during which the misfiled entries were copied forward into three successive recensions. The Reconciliation of 1334 restored the Register but preserved the erroneous figures in an appendix "for the instruction of posterity," which posterity has largely ignored. A brass plate on the second landing of Floor 286 records the episode; a smaller plate beneath it, added in 1336, records that the brass plate is not to be polished.

Records and objections

Every Assessment generates a file, and every file generates at least one objection, since the Standing Orders of the Assessment Register permit objection to the conduct, the convening, the conclusion, or the filing of an Assessment, but not to all four at once. Objections are heard by the office that conducted the Assessment, on the reasoning that it will know best what it did. This arrangement is defended in the Apology for the Register and criticized everywhere else.

The files of a completed Assessment are retained indefinitely and may be consulted by any Librarian of the fourth grade or above. They may not be consulted in the rain.

Scholarly disagreement

Two positions dominate the modern literature. The first, the cumulative school, holds that Assessments accumulate into a single composite standing, so that a subject which has passed eleven Assessments has eleven elevenths of a standing and requires only the remaining fractions to be complete. The second, the discrete school, holds that each Assessment is entire in itself and that a subject may hold eleven standings at once, none of which may be averaged. Marrow is claimed by both schools, having written in one folio that standings are "as bricks to a wall" and in the next that they are "as guests to a house, none of whom are aware of the others."

The Concordance on Referral Procedure favours the discrete reading in clause 22 but the Third Concordance favours the cumulative reading in Annex 7, and the Court of Concordant Claims has held that the two Concordances are to be read together wherever possible and separately wherever not. In practice the question is settled by whichever office holds the file. The Office of Volumetric Assessment has adopted the discrete reading without comment; the Office of Volitional Assessment has adopted the cumulative reading and does not discuss it.