What is authentic assessment and why is it important?
Authentic assessment, to me, is not meant to be the charged phrase, or jargony phrase that it has come to be for a lot of people. When we first started using it fifteen years ago, we merely meant to signify authentic work that big people actually do as opposed to fill-in-the-blanks, paper-and-pencil, multiple-choice, short-answer quiz, school-based assessment. So it’s authentic in the sense [that] it’s real. It’s realistic. If you go into the work place, they don’t give you a multiple-choice test to see if you’re doing your job. They have some performance assessment, as they say in business. Having said that, there is a misunderstanding. People say, “Well, if it’s not authentic, it can’t possibly be a good assessment.” We never said that. We never implied it. There’s a lot of authentic work that doesn’t make for good assessment because it’s so messy and squishy and it involves so many different people and so many variables that you can’t say with any certainty, “Well, what did that ind
