I was recently asked for my opinion about on-site, situated assessment—the type of assessment its disciples call "authentic".
This post argues that the concept of "authentic" assessment is a philosophical contradiction, a contradiction that becomes clear when we understand that any assessment, simulated or otherwise, can have no reality beyond its own constructed text. I'll explore how this fundamental insight, rooted in the work of Jacques Derrida, reveals a deep flaw in the "authentic" assessment approach to educational evaluation, a flaw that is both philosophical and profoundly human.
Derrida's famous aphorism, ‘il n'y a pas de hors-texte’, (‘there is nothing outside the text’) is usually applied to questions in literature and philosophy. I argue that educational assessments operate in this way. The moment we bring in a third-party observer into the workplace, the work is immediately reframed. A rubric is set, a time limit is imposed, and a specific task is assigned; in that moment, the real world ceases to be the subject. The subject becomes a constructed simulation, a text to be read and evaluated.
This dynamic creates a profound identity crisis for the apprentice, whose professional being is destabilized by a new, spectral identity as a “candidate”. Derrida's philosophy, in the reading of Dooley and Kavanagh, is fundamentally concerned with the related questions of memory and identity. It is a philosophical landscape haunted by ghosts and spectres, traces, ashes and mourning.
The destabilization of the apprentice's identity, this haunting, rooted in Derrida's concept of hauntology, is summoned by the assessor’s gaze. It is a presence that problematizes the apprentice’s being, ensuring that the individual is no longer a single, coherent being but a paradoxical blend of two conflicting identities, the candidate/apprentice. While the assessor's gaze reads a performance, the master electrician's gaze, in complete contrast, is a pedagogical one, and this distinction is where we find the true essence of authenticity—not in a test, but in a tradition.
The Apprentice Electrician as Assessor's "Text"
When assessing a candidate in a simulated environment, say, on their ability to test a lighting system, the specific test results don't matter in the same way that the results matter on-site. What matters in the assessment are the procedures and actions that the candidate performs. The candidate, in the simulated assessment, is not testing the circuit, but is instead performing through their actions that they know how to test the circuit. And in this regard, their actions are as much a simulation of testing as the environment is itself simulated. Their performance is judged on criteria like the settings of the test meter, and whether the test is carried out from the correct part of the circuit. They are, in other words, assessed according to the assessment rubric, and not on whether the installation wiring is up to scratch. The entire scenario is a contrived representation of reality, designed for the sole purpose of evaluation.
This arrangement ensures that the environment is safe for the candidate to perform and more importantly make mistakes without putting either themselves or the assessor at risk of danger. The assessment can reliably be taken at any centre with any assessor because the simulation is reproducible. The assessment takes place in a controlled environment free from the noise and distractions of a construction site. All the real-world messiness of an electrical installation on a site is cleared away to ensure that the simulated assessment only assesses the candidate's performance ensuring that the assessment has validity. Taking place in a test centre, the assessment is practicable and manageable in terms of bookings and staffing levels. And with all those controls in place, the assessor can concentrate on reading the candidate's actions as if they were reading a text. The candidate's actions are not real work but are instead signs to be interpreted by the assessor. There is no reality to the candidate's performance outside the text of the assessment rubric.
This philosophical error is somewhat paradoxical because the flaw in the “authentic” assessment is that it lacks genuine authenticity. The candidate still has to meet a constructed assessment criteria and it is the assessor’s reading of what is observed, and not the electrician's, that decides how the candidate has performed. It is, in other words, no more "authentic" than the simulation.
Perhaps even more than that, because there is a profound irony here. By its very nature, a situated, so-called "authentic" assessment takes place in the workplace. It is a disruption to the quotidian, the ordinary, the expected. It is a pre-planned, pre-scribed event that interrupts the flow of the workplace and imposes an external frame of scrutiny onto an organic process. To quote Derrida's friend, Emmanuel Lévinas, the workplace suffers 'an abrupt invasion' such that the space the assessor enters ceases to be: the workplace ceases to be a workplace. And, in this respect, there is nothing more inauthentic in the workplace than an "authentic" assessment.
The Haunted Identity of the Apprentice
Why summon hauntology to discuss authenticity in assessment? By melding haunting with ontology Derrida reconceptualises ghosts as spectres who disturb notions of time and history, blurring distinctions between the present, past, and future. Spectres also problematize being and non-being—they are paradoxically present but absent, unsettling conventional categories of what is real and what is not.
Thus begins Carmen Vallis’ paper which uses Derrida's concept of hauntology to trouble the idea of "authentic" assessment, framing it as a ‘spectre of lost futures’.
The apprentice is a professional-in-training. On-site, they are what they seem to be; their identity set in a practical, day-to-day sense; a shared, recognized identity within the community of practice. But the moment they enter an assessment, their identity as an apprentice is joined by a new, paradoxical identity that of the “candidate”.
This new identity is a kind of spectre; present, but not fully real, one that, as Vallis' paper points out, "problematises being and non-being". The apprentice is still an apprentice, but their professional being is now haunted by this other non-being of candidate, both, as Dooley and Kavanagh put it, ‘belonging and non-belonging, reducible to neither one nor the other’. We can formulate this dyad as the candidate/apprentice. The single word "apprentice" unable to exist without the trace of “candidate”. Both in a state of constant deferral.
In this haunting, the identity of the individual becomes fundamentally non-coherent. The apprentice's being is defined by their work, their relationship with the master electrician, their place within the grading structure. The candidate's identity, however, is inseparable from the assessment's rubric, the assessor's gaze, and the need to perform for a grade. These two identities exist simultaneously but can never truly merge or cohere into a unified whole.
Denial of the Spectre
This is where a more profound philosophical error lies. The advocates of "authentic"assessment seek to deny the existence of this spectral identity altogether. Like Hamlet asking Horatio, "Do you see it?" the answer that advocates of "authentic"assessment want to hear is "no," because that denial allows them to claim that the assessment is a pure, unmediated reflection of the apprentice's true being.
This haunting occurs irrespective of the simulated or situated nature of the assessment. The assessor's gaze is what summons this spectre. The assessor isn't just observing the candidate/apprentice's actions; they are reading them through the lens of an educational text. This gaze transforms the apprentice's professional identity into an academic one, a paradox that exists only within the contrived space of the assessment. Derrida's theory of hauntology lifts the visor of this ghostly presence to reveal that the "authentic" assessment is no more real than a simulated one.
It is the same with "authentic" assessment advocates who try to solve the problem of non-coherence with a separate, flawed act of coherence: equating the "authentic" with the real. A critical point to understand here is that a simulated assessment cannot be said to lack authenticity because it can never possess it. It is not a poor imitation of the real world; it is an entirely separate system with its own logic and its own text. A simulation's purpose is not to replicate reality but to create a controlled environment where a specific, pre-determined set of skills can be observed and evaluated against a specific rubric. The simulation is what it is—a text of a test—and pretending it is anything other than what it is in order to criticize what it cannot have is an act of bad educational faith.
But "authentic" assessment does more than simply deny the presence of the spectre. It seeks to magic its paradoxes away using the power of words. Its very name an incantation, a prayer, a spell. By calling itself "authentic”, the term attempts a deliberate act of concealment. The name itself is a kind of declarative magic, seeking to make real what is only an illusion. It is a linguistic sleight of hand that tries to erase the very spectre it summoned. By naming the assessment as authentic, we are led to believe that its reality is a given and that it has an outside to which it can be compared. But this is a flawed premise. The name is not a description of a quality; it is a declaration of a belief, an attempt to make a phantom cohere through an act of language.
The Electrician's Gaze: A Pedagogical Act
The gaze of “the other” signifies an ethical and existential encounter with a perspective beyond one's own. While the educational assessor's gaze haunts the apprentice by transforming them into a candidate, the master electrician's gaze does different work.
When I was an apprentice, I remember wanting to see my journeyman smile, acknowledge my work and realize that I respected him and his teaching enough to want to reproduce it. I wanted to see him see that I was learning and doing well. But the smile that I wanted to see wasn't just a mark of approval; it was a confirmation that I was becoming successfully initiated into a community of practice. The apprentice wants to see the journeyman's smile because that acknowledgment is a two-way sign of respect, and a confirmation that they are successfully learning to reproduce the master's craft.
This gaze is part of a shared text—the tradition of the trade itself. It is not there to judge against a rubric, but to guide, teach, and provide a model. This pedagogical gaze is a gaze of mentorship and acknowledgment. The apprentice is not performing for a grade; they are participating in a conversation that has been going on for generations. This is the un-haunted form of assessment, where the performance is not judged against a pre-written text, but is becoming part of a living one. And whilst all assessment is a form of reading, the master electrician's gaze is one of mentorship and tradition, whilst the educational assessor's is one of cold, bureaucratic scrutiny. What the assessor sees, all that the assessor sees, is the performance of the haunted candidate/apprentice. It is disingenuous to regard these identities, these differences, to be coherent or reconcilable.
Conclusion
As soon as an assessment rubric is in play the apprentice is haunted by the spectre of being a candidate. This happens irrespective of whether the apprentice is in a college classroom, an assessment centre, or if an assessor assesses them on-site. There is no escaping the fact that all assessments are essentially inauthentic. We cannot escape the reality that any assessment, simulated or otherwise, is a constructed system. The frame is inseparable from the assessor's gaze. When that frame is established, there is no outside of it—and huis clos, no way out. An assessment is not merely an observation; it is a complex, closed system of evaluation. To argue otherwise is at best naive and, at worst, dishonest.
References
Mark Dooley, 'The Surprising Conservatism of Jacques Derrida', The European Conservative, https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/the-surprising-conservatism-of-jacques-derrida/, accessed 20th August 2025
Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh, (2007) The Philosophy of Derrida, Abingdon , Routledge
Carmen Vallis (2025) ‘Authentic assessment in higher education: the spectre of lost futures’, Teaching in Higher Education, 30:3, 744-751, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2024.2362217
Episode #190 (26 December 2022) - Deconstructing Derrida: A Dialogue with Peter Salmon by Converging Dialogues on Audible. https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B0BR4CTH5Q?source_code=ORGOR69210072400FU, accessed 21st August 2025
Peter Salmon (2021) An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida, London, Verso
Image Credits
Gisela Giardino, Derrida at Jorge Luis Borges´ home in Buenos Aires, 1995, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 12th October 2004, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jaques_Derrida_(cropped).jpg, CC-A-SA 2.0 Generic, (accessed 25th August 2025)
Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4), print, Robert Thew, after Henry Fuseli, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 11th July 2017, This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0 1.0, https://share.google/WTpf9JyXlEcycvQQq, accessed 26th August 2024
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