Authentic assessment in higher education: the spectre of lost futures

In this Point of Departure, the idea of authentic assessment is examined and troubled by drawing on Derrida's hauntology. The spectres of higher education invite us to reconsider what is 'real' about past, present, and future assessment practices. Such spectres do not lecture or produce a single, definitive interpretation. Rather, these spectres provoke speculation on whether authenticity remains a useful construct for assessment in academia. This hauntological perspective summons the paradoxes and contradictions of the 'more-than-real' in authentic assessment, recalling lost futures and creative possibility.