A blueprint for higher ed educators considering the hackathon format as a capstone or alternative assessment tool.
Author: Maxine Gill, Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics
Table of Content
Traditional assessments—such as final exams and term papers—can provide useful evidence of learning. But they are not always the best fit for determining how well can students integrate knowledge, make decisions under uncertainty, collaborate, communicate their reasoning, and apply course concepts to a real-world problem.
Authentic assessment responds to the limits of traditional assessments that primarily reward recall by asking students to apply knowledge and skills in a meaningful context. Students may be asked to produce, perform, justify decisions, and reflect on their process—not only demonstrate what they can remember. Its value lies not in making an assignment feel “real world,” but in designing a cognitively demanding task with meaningful feedback, structured reflection, and clear criteria that reveal students’ thinking and reasoning, and promotes student agency (Zhan et al, 2025).
Figure 1: Figure of authentic assessment in and beyond the workplace (Zhan et al, 2025, p.1)
If you’re intrigued about incorporating more authentic assessment in your classroom, hackathons can be a fruitful and engaging starting point. A course hackathon can function as an capstone assessment when it is deliberately designed to assess the outcomes students have developed across the course. At the end of the term, students apply that learning to a bounded, unfamiliar challenge: they develop and defend a solution or prototype, explain the evidence and trade-offs behind their decisions, and evaluate the limits of their approach.
The purpose is not to substitute entertainment for rigor, or collaboration for individual learning. It is to generate more direct evidence of transfer, and determine whether students can mobilize knowledge and skills in a new context, rather than demonstrate them only in classroom conditions in which they were taught. The table below summarizes how traditional and authentic assessment generate different kinds of evidence regarding students’ foundational knowledge and mastery of a subject.
| Dimension | Traditional assessment | Authentic assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Primary question | What does the student know or recognize? | What can the student do with what they know? |
| Typical formats | Selected-response exams, quizzes, short-answer tests, timed essays, and some conventional research papers | Projects, performances, case analyses, portfolios, simulations, design challenges, demonstrations, presentations, and structured reflections |
| Nature of the task | Students typically answer discrete prompts or solve defined problems | Students address a complex, bounded problem or produce a meaningful performance, product, or recommendation |
| Context | Often decontextualized so that student responses can be compared consistently | Situated in a realistic, disciplinary, professional, civic, or simulated context |
| Knowledge use | May assess recall, recognition, procedural fluency, and discrete concepts or skills | Requires students to select, integrate, and apply relevant knowledge and skills |
| Student reasoning | Reasoning may be visible in constructed-response items, but can be difficult to capture in selected-response formats | Students are expected to explain, justify, and often revise decisions, interpretations, or products |
| Correctness and quality | Often emphasizes accuracy against predetermined answers or scoring criteria | Assesses the quality, feasibility, evidence base, and justification of a response; multiple defensible solutions may be possible |
| Feedback and revision | Commonly used as a single point-in-time measure; feedback may come after grading | Often incorporates feedback, iteration, revision, and reflection as part of the learning and assessment process |
| Individual vs. collaborative work | Most often individual, which can make individual accountability straightforward | May be individual or collaborative; group formats require explicit mechanisms to assess each student’s contribution and learning |
| Scoring | Often efficient, standardized, and reliable across large numbers of students | Usually relies on rubrics and professional judgment; scoring can take more time and requires calibration for consistency |
| Strengths | Efficient for large cohorts; useful for checking foundational knowledge, conceptual understanding, and individual mastery; can be highly rigorous when well designed | Produces more direct evidence of transfer, judgment, integration, communication, and applied disciplinary practice |
| Common risks | Can overemphasize recall or test-taking strategies if tasks are narrowly designed; may not reveal whether students can apply learning in new settings | Can become vague, inequitable, or difficult to score consistently if the task, criteria, scaffolding, and individual accountability are unclear |
| Best fit | Learning outcomes involving foundational concepts, terminology, calculation, recognition, procedural fluency, or individual knowledge checks | Learning outcomes involving transfer, problem solving, design, inquiry, professional judgment, communication, collaboration, and reflection |
The educational value of a hackathon does not reside in the format itself. A hackathon becomes a credible assessment only when it is designed to make learning visible. The next step is to decide what students should be able to demonstrate, what evidence will show that they have done so, and how the event will elicit and assess that evidence; we’ll jump into this in the following sections.
Before designing the challenge, identify the learning you need students to demonstrate. What should they be able to do at the end of the course that they could not reliably do at the beginning?
Make sure to define such learning outcomes in action-oriented language that describes how students will demonstrate their learning (Niemer, 2025). For instance, “students will understand ethical frameworks” is difficult to assess directly. A more useful outcome is: “students will apply relevant ethical frameworks to analyze a contested case, identify trade-offs, and defend a justified recommendation.”
Once you identify the learning outcome, define what credible evidence of that outcome would look like. Then build the event around students’ opportunity to generate that evidence.
Figure 2: Design sequence for a Hackathon
This sequence prevents a common design mistake: beginning with an exciting theme or platform and trying to fit educational goals around it afterward. Here is an example of applying such a sequence to a upper-level political science course in negotiation.
| Start with | Ask | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Learning Outcome | What should students be able to do? | Develop and execute a principled negotiation strategy in a multi-party political dispute by identifying interests, BATNAs, reservation points, sources of leverage, and possible zones of agreement. |
| Evidence | What would demonstrate that ability? | A negotiation plan that distinguishes positions from underlying interests; identifies each party’s BATNA, priorities, and constraints; proposes options for mutual gain; and explains the coalition-building, communication, and concession strategy the team will use. |
| Challenge | What tasks would require students to produce that evidence? | Represent an assigned stakeholder in a time-bounded, multi-party negotiation over a proposed regional water-sharing compact following a severe drought. Teams must negotiate an agreement among state, municipal, agricultural, Indigenous, environmental, and industry representatives. |
| Deliverables | What will students submit, show, and/or explain? | A pre-negotiation strategy memo; participation in the live negotiation; a jointly negotiated agreement or a documented explanation of impasse; and an individual post-negotiation reflection analyzing decisions, trade-offs, ethical questions, and revisions to the student’s original strategy. |
| Rubric | How will the quality be judged? | Conflict Analysis and Preparation: How well students analyze the dispute and prepare to represent their assigned actor’s interests, constraints, and alternatives. Strategic judgment during negotiation: How well students adapt their strategy as new information, proposals, or coalition dynamics emerge Post-negotiation analysis: How well students evaluate the process and negotiation outcome using course concepts |
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Hackathons are most useful when the course outcomes involve transfer: students must select and use learning in a problem that does not arrive with a single prescribed method or answer.
They are especially well suited to outcomes such as: