IntroductionWith the advent of education in the 21st century, educators have begun to ask how students are assessed. When students are assessed, do they really get a true picture of what the student has learned? Authentic assessment takes a different approach; essentially the curriculum is built around assessment. In other words, you will teach to the test and students will be given a real-world application as an assessment. The following review provides insight into the reasoning behind authentic assessments and how to develop them. Literature Review According to Jon Mueller, professor of psychology at North Central College, in his article “What is Authentic Assessment,” assessment is what should guide the curriculum. This means that when teachers use authentic assessment they should first decide the tasks that students will carry out to demonstrate their competence and then the curriculum will be developed to enable students to carry out those tasks with ease, this would include achieving knowledge and skills essential. This has been called backward planning. He uses the example of someone who attends a golf course and then evaluates his performance by taking a multiple-choice test. This would not make sense; this theory would put them on the golf course and simply ask them to play golf. While this is evident for athletic ability, it is also true for academic subjects. We should be teaching students how to do math, history, and science, not just know them. Then, we evaluate what students have learned; we have students perform tasks that duplicate homework. When using authentic assessment, teachers are encouraged to teach to the test. Students will need to learn how to perform well… halfway through the paper… They created a rubric of performance indicators and timelines to track each group's progress as they built the model cell (Moore , 1998). The evidence that authentic assessment is a better way to measure how much a student learns appears to be strong. Educators need to take this to heart; It is right that students have the certainty that they are learning life skills. Works Cited Moore, R. (1998, May-June). Help teachers define and develop authentic assessment and assessment practices. Evaluation update.Mueller, J. (2011). What is authentic assessment? Retrieved September 23, 2011, from Authentic Assessment Tool Box: http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/whatisit.htmWiggins, G. (1996/1997, December/January). Practice what we preach in designing authentic assessments. Teaching for authentic student performance, pp. 18-25.