Informed by Goffman's influential essay on "The neglected situation" this paper examines the contextual and interactive dimensions of performance in large-scale educational assessments. The paper applies Goffman's participation framework and associated theory in linguistic anthropology to examine how testing situations are framed and enacted as social occasions. It considers assessment as a shared focus of social activity, located in time and space, involving an assemblage of artefacts and actors. The paper presents ethnographic examples of adult literacy and numeracy assessment in Mongolia. The first part provides ethnographic description of a testing situation. The second part looks in detail at how linguistic interaction influences assessment performance.