Lessons in Teaching: What is Authentic Assessment?

As a student, did you ever Christmas tree a test (ie. choose answers at random so your scantron bubbles took the shape of an evergreen) and receive a decent score for not knowing much of anything?

Did you ever finish a course at the end of the semester and wipe your brain clean of all the memorization you did in that class, for material that still doesn’t make any sense to you?

A friend of mine who majored in Accounting recently confessed that despite her good grades throughout college, during her first accounting job, she didn’t know how to do anything she was assigned to do. She finally had to really learn accounting once real life set in.

Authentic assessment may be the answer to this higher education problem we’ve been looking for.

I just took a faculty development course appropriately titled, Authentic Assessment, and it really opened my eyes.

For those that don’t know:

Definition of authentic assessment– Generally open-ended questions that allow for some gray area, and test your knowledge as it can be applied to real-life scenarios

This is what we need more of.

Sure, it doesn’t leave student answers and scores as ‘clean’ as us teachers might prefer, but actual learning takes place. Longer-lasting learning.

You may already be using authentic assessment in online discussions and projects with your students, with the help of a rubric that measures the quality of the answers.

Bring it on. Create more of them, and help your students get more from their education.

Happy teaching, and happy learning.