LAUSR

Assessment is subject to increasing scrutiny as medical education transitions towards a competency‐based medical education (CBME) model. Traditional perspectives on the roles of assessment emphasise high‐stakes, summative assessment, whereas CBME argues for formative assessment. Revisiting conceptualisations about the roles and formats of assessment in medical education provides opportunities to examine understandings and expectations of the assessment of learners. The act of the rater generating scores might be considered as an exclusively cognitive exercise; however, current literature has drawn attention to the notion of raters as measurement instruments, thereby attributing additional factors to their decision‐making processes, such as social considerations and intuition. However, the literature has not comprehensively examined the influence of raters’ emotions during assessment. In this narrative review, we explore the influence of raters’ emotions in the assessment of learners.