The empirical material and results presented in this paper come from an ongoing ethnography-inspired study of inclusion in mathematics as seen from a student perspective. This study did not initially focus on assessment, but when investigating what influences students’ experiences of school mathematics, assessment came out as a result. The research participants are not ordinary students, but students who need some degree of special education in mathematics, either as gifted or as low-performing students. For these students, traditional assessment in mathematics does not provide any relevant feedback to support them. On the whole, assessment primarily influences either how they write solutions to tasks, but not exactly how they solve them, or else how they feel about themselves as low performers in mathematics.