This paper examines the increasing interest of Swedish schools to construct, analyze, assess and control the individual progression and social integration of students using biographical registers. I argue that this tendency--involving biography as a form of governance--can be seen as a revision of early 20th-century biographical research by the Chicago School of Sociology. In this paper I consider the theoretical, methodological and political background of the Chicago work in order to compare it to the Swedish use of "student biographies". Their current use involves a twofold subjectification of students--as "objects" of assessment and as "relays" for assessment. Finally, this subjectivity is understood in relation to international initiatives in education restructuring where new ways of governing--often labeled as progressive--impose social control, heighten individual responsibility and, not least, create new forms of social exclusion. (Contains 9 notes.)