This theoretical enquiry was geared towards the formation and advancement of a scholarly discourse in the context of higher education practitioners levels of assessment literacy. Despite having recently gained an unprecedented level of currency among academics, assessment literacy, as a higher education professional attribute, remains largely not theorised. The related scholarly thought has mostly evolved around a particular emancipatory discourse. Such thinking is also underpinned by a certain degree of subservience to the conventional notions of professional ethics and morality that subsumes assessment literacy. The emergence of the higher education transformation discourse has also resulted in trepidations felt at individual and institutional levels, further confounding assessment-related professional attributes as a ripple effect. A conceptual consolidation of the idea of assessment as a professional literacy, together with its associated constructs, is therefore mooted here. The practice of assessment-literacy-related professional development subscribing to the notions of critical theory, critical reflection, and 21st century skills, was hence philosophically substantiated, so that such practices assume a higher degree of legitimacy and credence. Assessment, the single most dominant student experience, as this article concludes, needs significant philosophical reaffirmation. Such a reaffirmation forms the basis for the continuance of progressive discourses, and is hence vital in the context of advancement of assessment literacy as an aspect of higher education professional literacy.

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