Two Lenses, One Rubric: A Classroom Exercise to Surface and Reduce Hidden Cognitive Bias in Analytic Assessment

Educators in management education often debate what assessment outcomes reflect, including language, content knowledge, reasoning, and the alignment between student responses and rubric expectations. This submission focuses on the design and validity implications of that alignment. I propose that some common case based assessment formats and rubric language can make analytic presentation conventions more legible to markers, such as explicit problem decomposition and linear argument structure, while offering fewer cues for recognising holistic reasoning that foregrounds context, interdependence, and second order consequences. I present a brief, adaptable classroom exercise that helps students and educators notice these effects and respond to them. Participants complete the same case task under analytic or holistic prompts, assess responses using contrasting rubric lenses, and debrief how rubric design shapes what counts as quality and how an integrated rubric can recognise both modes.