Authentic assessment takes many different formats, but one characteristic is that it usually has an audience beyond the marker and an imagined purpose beyond completing an assessment ‘just for the sake of a grade’.  

Assessments that are authentic typically allow students to apply theory to practice, often framed with contemporary challenges which students may face in their life and work in a globalised world.  

These types of assessments often mirror disciplinary and professional practice, building students’ employability skills and allowing them to work creatively and solve problems. Authentic assessment approaches require students to think critically, conduct disciplinary research and often to work with others to produce or represent knowledge in new ways. 

Through working with others, authentic assessments create processes with milestones and feedback and often encourages students to exercise their agency in making choices and being creative in the way approach the assessment. Some authentic assessment takes the form of simulations, asking students to model solutions to challenges. 

Why is authentic assessment important?  

Authentic assessment and learning engages students meaningfully and helps to make their experiences of study more compelling – and this is also very much the case for staff as well. Marking authentic assessment is usually rewarding and exciting as there is more likely to be originality and creativity in students’ responses to authentic assessment.  

Authentic assessment engages students as they typically feel assessments are more worthwhile to undertake because they have wider resonance. These assessments are often the most memorable part of their studies and enables students to produce work as insiders and participants in a discipline.  

As authentic assessment has the potential for dialogue with a wider range of stakeholders, this often creates accountability and encourages acting on feedback from credible sources both within and outside of academia. 

When authentic assessment involves collaboration, this not only  challenges students to think about the purpose of their learning for their discipline, society and for themselves and where they take ownership of their assessment, this reinforces the value of slow and deep learning. 

Students in recent focus groups have discussed their experiences of what they feel are authentic assessment experiences:   

‘The skills you get from [group projects] are directly applicable to what you’re going to do with the rest of your life’ 

‘Group projects give the possibility of being really passionate about the topic. If you spend, I don’t know, three months doing something, you take an active part in it. It’s not like writing an essay where you’re just researching some topics, write it down for your mark and that’s it. You’re wanting to make a change in what you’re studying.’  

‘The (grant proposal) was linked to the real-world which really gave me a lot of confidence. I thought, well, if I can do this assignment, it's not that different from the real world, so I could do it in the real world...’