This paper provides an overview of the issue of student anonymity in the summative assessment of student work in higher education. It considers both theoretical literature pertaining to bias in the evaluation of the work of others and the limited empirical work undertaken on this issue in higher education. It then describes the experience of three higher education institutions in their institutional consideration of student anonymity in assessment. It concludes with an attempt to integrate three perspectives from teaching and learning theory into the anonymity debate, which has largely been conceived in terms of institutional policy, and suggests that there is scope for much further teaching and learning research in the area. (Contains 1 table and 3 notes.)