Is authentic assessment leaving some students behind?

Has our focus on authentic assessment developed a blind spot? 

Authentic assessment asks students to use the same set of knowledge, competencies and attitudes they’ll use as graduates, connecting university content to their future. But our current authentic assessments often ignore a key component: the student.

Assessments with ‘authentic’ features that aren’t accessible: personal authenticity

Your authentic assessment may be assessing irrelevant student characteristics instead of learning outcomes. Authentic features such as an emergency room setting or board meeting may create additional “noise”, with their time pressure and stress inadvertently assessing speed of writing or stress management, disadvantaging students without those skills. There’s a time for complex, uncertain environments, but make sure you aren’t sacrificing some of your students for a flashy experience.

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Disabled and other students often spend an enormous amount of time with course administration, policy requirements and equity red tape when assessment adjustments are required. Sometimes these result in being excused from many (or all) great assessment experiences, impacting the overarching learning experience. 

“I’m often given exemptions from high-impact or authentic activities, because academics don’t believe they can be adapted,” student and disability advocate Bailey Wemyss told us. This reflects the frequent mismatch between our perception and the student reality.

How to address this: Consider implementing features of an inclusive workplace into authentic assessment, such as deadline flexibility. If this seems radical, consider that “real world” staff are usually allowed input into how their work is structured, and to negotiate extensions when necessary. 

Aiming for an assessment to exactly replicate industry misses the point. Industry is required (in Australia) to adapt work to be accessible to staff with disability. In an assessment context, a students-as-partners approach may provide students with opportunity to maintain agency, explain their barriers and suggest effective workarounds.

Remember there isn’t just one authentic “future workplace”. Use a range of assessments within the programme with different dimensions of authenticity. No assessment is universally accessible, and this can help decrease the impact of an inaccessible assessment. 

My ‘real world’ and your ‘real world’ are not the same: sociocultural authenticity

Authenticity is situated. To envisage a realistic workplace or community means considering the person who will live, work in and engage with it. Authentic assessments typically make assumptions about a student’s aspirations and future, as well as their cultural, social and financial context. Many authentic assessments assume cultural neutrality. However, there is no culturally neutral assessment, because there is no “neutral” or default culture. 

As Deakin University’s Martin Nakata explained, “We don’t go to work or school, enter another domain, interact and leave it there when we come home again.” When assessments are disconnected from students’ cultural or social reality, it creates challenge, tension and constant negotiation. Ohio State University’s Michele Hansen and Purdue University’s Corinne Renguette suggest culturally indifferent assessment practices can also prevent students from showing what they have learned.

How to address this: Socioculturally authentic assessment requires input from those with lived experience. It entails understanding students as intersectional beings, acknowledging their potentially complex and intersecting cultural and community contexts. No single student is “diverse”, so input should be broad. With many student aspirations and contexts, “authentic” means embedding choice and flexibility into the assessment. 

In assessment development, co-creation or partnership with the student and/or their communities will more likely translate into a deeper level of authenticity and meaning for students than consultation.  

Students have unique expert knowledge of their own contexts, so assessment that encourages connections-making between students’ lives and learning can create a strengths-based approach. 

For impact, educators should aim for learning to flow both ways, with authenticity in their own engagement. For example, sustained genuine, meaningful engagement of non-Indigenous educators with Indigenous communities and ways of knowing is recommended to develop increased empathy, more effective engagement with Indigenous students and deeper understanding of relationships as a central Indigenous pedagogy. 

Our current ‘real world’ shouldn’t be here in the future: future and ethical authenticity

Our “real world” is far from perfect. There are structural inequalities and wicked problems seemingly everywhere. Authentic assessment is meant to engage students meaningfully, but the benefits may be lost for students who envision a different world. Instead of preparing graduates to accept or replicate current issues, authentic assessment can help them create new, transformed futures. 

How to address this: Lancaster University’s Jan McArthur suggests authentic assessment can do societal good and/or mimic real-world community tasks, engaging students with important, worthwhile questions. Inviting students to work alongside a community to understand and solve problems together is empowering for both and invites personal meaning. 

An example of meaningful assessment is the Cities alive: designing cities that work for women project by the University of Liverpool with ARUP and the United Nations Development Programme. With an emphasis on intersectional women, master’s in planning students contributed to the report’s literature review led by senior lecturer in planning Catherine Queen, strengthening the evidence base and promoting transformative change.

When designing authentic assessment, consider the student as an active, present component, whose rich contexts strongly influence their performance and experience. Including partnership, choice and flexibility is authentic – and likely translates into a more resonant student experience.

Sue Sharpe is at Australian National University; Jennifer Z. Sun is lecturer in finance at the University of Sydney.

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