Last year I devised some assessment ‘Top Trumps’ cards which detailed 30 possible assessment types with the aim of starting conversations about authentic assessment.
As a reminder, or if you are finding these for the first time, these are a set of cards that can be downloaded. Each card contains an outline of an assessment that may be considered to be authentic. You may not agree, and that’s fine. The assessment type is briefly explained. On each card, there also is a panel which lists each of Ashford-Rowe, Herrington and Brown’s eight characteristics of authentic assessment. The assessment type on the card is then given a star rating (out of five) for each characteristic. The idea of the cards is that they provide a simple starter for discussions about how assessment may become more authentic, and what options could be drawn upon.
I have updated the cards with twenty additional assessment ideas. I have also added two more rating factors to the cards. First, a ‘sustainability impact’ rating. This indicates the extent to which the assessment could directly impact an audience in relation to sustainability (this is added by the request of others who have used the cards). Second, is a rating for staff demand – at almost every talk or session I do around authentic assessment, colleagues are concerned about the demand on their own workload (and this is understandable). By adding the demand rating, I hope to trigger discussions about what may be manageable for staff as well as valuable for students. In addition, I have also added a definition card as a result of my continued quest to really identify what we mean by authentic assessment (ideas for this were crowd-sourced from the amazing online educational community on Twitter).
I hope these cards prove useful to prompt thinking about what we can do with our assessments to engage and motivate students, to cause learning through assessment, and to encourage students to begin to use their learning for wider impact and to influence others.
Here are the ‘Top Trumps’ as a PowerPoint SlideDeck – please feel free to edit and adapt for non-commercial purposes.
And in-case it is helpful here is a link to the original post in 2021. Do let me know if these are useful or if they aren’t!
Lydia Arnold 
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