Authentic assessment, or assessment that focuses on demonstrating competencies as they take place in—or in an environment emulating—the real-world is both sound pedagogy and naturally protects assessment integrity.

This presentation by Karen Harris of Rutgers’ Teaching and Learning With Technology presents an excellent list of 10 suggested alternatives to exams that can be aligned with many subjects and goals, and is a nice introduction to authentic assessment.

Why Authentic Assessment?

Integrity: While striving to build a culture of integrity and inquiry in the classroom is always recommended, authentic assessments will naturally be more difficult, if not impossible to cheat.
True and Direct Measures: Performance on traditional tests and quizzes can be misleading in assessing mastery and inaccurate in predicting performance. Authentic assessment directly measures performance.
Learning as an Ongoing Process: Authentic assessment treats learning as a process, demonstrating mastery at the point of assessment and creating habits of mind that serve learners in their professions.
Integration: Authentic assessment bridges the gaps between teaching, learning and assessment, encouraging and integrated approach.
Construct and Consequential Validity: Authentic assessments have greater construct validity—they are more likely to measure what is intended to be measured (competency, process, and performance in, or as it would be in the real world—and greater consequential validity, contributing positively to the teaching.

What is Authentic Assessment?

Grant Wiggins, who popularized the concept, identifies 27 characteristics of authentic assessment, including that they:

Are appropriately public,
Do not rely on unrealistic, arbitrary time constraints,
Are not "one shot," but are process-based,
Are contextualized and complex, not "atomized" into isolated objectives,
Are representative of challenges of the field or subject,
Involve essential criteria, not what is easily scored,
Allow appropriate choice for students to express their style and interests,
Uses rubrics for transparency of expectations and evaluations,
Incorporate self-reflection and meta-cognitive exploration,
Allows for feedback, practice and second chances, and
Make self-assessment part of the assessment.

It can also be useful to consider how features of authentic assessment compare to features of traditional assessment (which should complement one another!):

Traditional Assessment	Authentic Assessment
Select a response	Perform a task
Contrived, Artificial	Real-life, or a strong simulation of it
Recall and recognition	Construction and application
Teacher structured	Student structured
Indirect evidence	Direct evidence

Examples of Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment comes in a multitude of forms and crosses all disciplines. Some examples:

Portfolio building, such as creating a research portfolio
Participating in a virtual stock market
Solving real-world problems posed by, and in collaboration with, external partners
Scripting, creating, and editing short films and documentaries
Role play, such as participating in a simulated newspaper,
Evaluate news stories for validity and bias
Peer review activities
Problem- and project-based learning
Discussion board participation (beyond the basics) particularly if intentionally constructed to promote student leadership, weaving and summarizing, etc. See Better Discussion for more
Write applications, programs and documentation for real-world clients
Community engaged learning / service learning