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Authentic Assessment

NEW: A vision for education and skills at Newcastle University: Education for Life 2030+

Introduction

Authentic assessment is an approach in which students demonstrate their learning through contextualised, meaningful tasks that connect with their futures beyond the classroom. It encourages students to:

  • apply and integrate knowledge and skills
  • exercise judgement in context
  • produce work that has professional, civic and/or personal relevance

Authentic Assessment has become an established practice across the HE sector. Many of your existing assessments will already reflect this approach, including:

  • capstone projects
  • reflective assignments
  • activities that involve an external partner from a relevant sector

Thinking about Authentic Assessment is a way to realise the values of the Leading Edge Curriculum, which emphasise:

Taken as a whole, this approach offers students meaningful experiences that connect their learning to future professional demands, ensuring students are well prepared for the challenges of modern workplaces and society.

Leading Edge Curriculum icons.

Incorporate assessment tasks that meaningfully connect to students' futures beyond the classroom… at each stage at least two substantive pieces of assessment must meaningfully connect to the students’ futures beyond the classroom.

Leading Edge Curriculum Framework, Clause 3.3

What is Authentic Assessment?

By applying their learning to tasks that mirror real-world activities and responsibilities, Authentic Assessment helps students develop and demonstrate skills, knowledge, and attributes that are directly applicable beyond the classroom, preparing them for future careers and life.

Villareol’s (2018) literature review identifies three common dimensions of authentic assessment:

  • Realism: solving problems relevant to everyday or professional life.
  • Cognitive challenge: focusing on higher order thinking and applying knowledge.
  • Evaluative judgement: supporting students to evaluate their own performance.

These dimensions have clear links to our EFL Skills and Attributes, where several of the attributes in the growth mindsets of excellence, creativity, and impact can be developed and assessed through these types of tasks. Some of these skills and attributes are highlighted in the Examples of Authentic Assessment given below.

Why use authentic assessment?

The benefits of authentic assessment include:

  • Quality and depth of learning.
  • Development of higher cognitive skills.
  • Increased autonomy, motivation, and commitment.
  • Better self-regulation, metacognition, and self-reflection.

It is important to state that authentic assessment has wider social applicability (McArthur, 2023) and need not be linked solely to discipline-specific employability skills. In a section headed 'From task performance to why we value the task,' McArthur argues that assessment is most powerful when it focuses not just on completing tasks but on understanding their social value. By making explicit how academic work contributes to wider wellbeing, such as addressing environmental challenges, supporting inclusion, or enriching culture, we help students see the real impact of their learning. This builds empathy, strengthens their sense of purpose, and reinforces the connection between individual achievement and social good, whatever their discipline.

Examples of Authentic Assessment

  • Responding to a scenario: Students analyse and respond to realistic situations, often with incomplete information and competing priorities. EFL Skills and Attributes: adaptability and resilience, critical thinking, problem solving, creative thinking, leading and influencing.
  • Project based assessment: Students undertake substantial projects that result in tangible products or solutions to real-world problems, often working over an extended period. EFL Skills and Attributes: self-management, problem solving, self-directed learning, innovating, insight.
  • Performance based assessment: Students demonstrate skills through direct performance, often in front of an audience or panel of assessors. EFL Skills and Attributes: creative thinking, communication, adaptability and resilience, insight.
  • Simulations and role plays: Students participate in structured experiences that replicate professional situations, allowing them to practice skills in a controlled environment. EFL Skills and Attributes: problem solving, creative thinking, communication, collaboration, leading and influencing.
  • Client based projects: Students work with actual clients (businesses, community organisations, etc.) to solve problems or meet specific needs. EFL Skills and Attributes: self-management, problem solving, creative thinking, collaboration, insight.
  • Professional resources: Students create documents, tools, or resources that professionals in their field regularly produce. EFL Skills and Attributes: creative thinking, digital fluency, innovating, future facing.

Designing Authentic Assessment

Authenticity exists on a spectrum, you don’t need to create perfectly authentic tasks to gain the benefit of this approach to assessment.

  1. Start with your programme and module learning outcomes.
  2. Identify a plausible context – one that is faithful to your discipline or subject area; this could be, for example, a client scenario; a recent news item; or a workplace issue. Your context may be rooted in one of your programme's Encounters with the Leading Edge or a Cross-Cutting Curriculum Theme.
  3. Define the format of the output and the intended audience. You may wish to give students several choices.
  4. Define clear assessment criteria for the task. If it is group task make it clear whether you are assessing the product, the process, or both.
  5. Give students the opportunity to respond to feedback. Consider how this could mirror disciplinary or professional practice.
  6. Build in reflection. Depending on the nature of the task, you may wish to include opportunities to reflect on important elements e.g. decision making, how they overcame challenges, the skills and attributes they developed.

Authentic assessment and collaborative working

While authentic tasks can be set for individuals, there are many benefits of implementing authentic assessment for groups.

Collaborative working:  

  • Reflects the workplace: most professional environments require collaboration across teams and departments.
  • Develops essential professional skills: students have opportunities to develop and demonstrate communication, negotiation, prioritisation and time management, accountability and reliability.
  • Enables more complex realistic projects: Working in teams allows students to undertake larger, more sophisticated projects that would be impractical for individuals. This better simulates the complexity of real-world challenges and allows for more authentic deliverables.
  • Peer learning: students can learn from each other drawing on their different strengths and perspectives. Their combined backgrounds and experiences enables more diverse ideation and internal feedback.
  • Supports reflective practice: Collaborative work requires students to explain their thinking, defend their ideas and consider alternative ideas.

Collaborative working also offers the opportunity to develop EFL Skills and Attributes such as communication, collaboration, and leading and influencing.

AI and Authentic Assessment

It is widely accepted that AI will continue to grow in importance as a common workplace tool. In survey results published in March 2026, 68% of students surveyed by HEPI believe AI skills are essential to thrive in today’s world. Therefore, the ability to critically use and harness Generative AI is an essential skill, one that students can develop through assessment tasks that are designed to encourage AI use.

See our AI in Assessment page for ideas on authentic coursework activities that include AI by design along with our AI and Assessment Ideas Deck. 

Digital Technologies

The University has a number digital tools that can support you as you design and implement authentic assessment:

NUReflect

NU Reflect provides the tools to support personal, professional and academic reflection:

  1. Structured reflection: NU Reflect provides templates and frameworks that guide students through the reflective process. This helps them critically analyse their learning experiences, skills, and development.
  2. Skill development: students can track and categorise their skills against frameworks, ensuring they are meeting the necessary competencies for their programme.
  3. Portfolio creation: By compiling their reflections, students can create comprehensive portfolios that showcase their learning journey and achievements. These portfolios can be used for both academic assessment and professional development. To find out more watch this short video on portfolio development in NU Reflect.  

For more information on NU Reflect, visit NU Reflect | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University

Buddycheck for peer evaluation

Buddycheck is a Canvas integrated tool which allows students’ to peer evaluate group work contributions. 

As a peer evaluation tool Buddycheck allows students to evaluate contributions of their group members providing feedback for assessors.

Buddycheck’s peer evaluation allows for:

  • Real-world relevance: students engage in providing constructive feedback on others work.
  • Responsibility and accountability: this encourages students, as part of the group work, to take responsibility for their contribution and be accountable due to peer scoring impact on individual grades.
  • Reflection: during the process, self scores are captured which also encourages self reflection skill enhancement.

 For further details please see Buddycheck | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University

 

Authentic tasks in Digital Exams

Inspera, our University Digital Exam system has a number of features to make it possible to include authentic tasks in an exam setting. Examples include case study-based scenarios, role play and simulation style assessment questions.  

  • Video based Digital Exams: incorporating medical based videos into Digital Exams has become a valuable part of authentic assessments, designed to engage students in interpreting, analysing and applying learning in practical ways 
  • Audio based Digital Exams: including audio clips within phonetics based Digital Exams mimics practical tasks students may face in the field  
  • Keyboard Language altering based Digital Exams: within language courses, changing the keyboard language to match the language being assessed allows students to type using the target language, using correct characters and accents. There is a case study all about this method.
  • Open resources: Inspera Digital Exams can be created so certain resources, such as data sets or access to specialized software (i.e. SPSS) can be accessed during a Digital Exam. Allowing students to use tools which are used in real-world professions demonstrates real world application. 

Inspera is a digital exam platform enabling locked down exams to take place on campus. For more information see Inspera | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University

H5P

H5P is a powerful tool that can be used to create interactive and engaging online content through a simple user interface.

H5P allows you to create a wide range of different types of interactive content, which could be used to scaffold elements of authentic assessments or provide opportunities for formative practice. In particular, the branching scenario can be used to create intricate real-world scenarios with multiple outcomes. See H5P's Branching Scenarios Guidance for some examples.

For more information about getting started with H5P please visit H5P | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University

References

  • Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), Student Generative Artificial Intelligence Survey 2026, available online from HEPI.
  • McArthur, J. Rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being, and society. High Education 85, 85–101 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00822-y
  • Pitt, E. and Quinlan, K.M., 2022. Impacts of higher education assessment and feedback policy and practice on students: a review of the literature 2016-2021. (Advance HE)
  • Villarroel, V., Bloxham, S., Bruna, D., Bruna, C., & Herrera-Seda, C. (2017). Authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(5), 840–854, available from the Newcastle University Library.