Dr Peter Alcott and Dr Tony Willis discuss how they created authentic assessment of knowledge, skills and attitudes of 66 post-graduate students in an Event Operations Management module. Students worked together in small groups in order to create, implement and evaluate a real-life profitable event. Students formally met once a week during a three-hour interactive class, as well as meeting with the peers in their group outside class during the week in order to work on group deliverables and successfully complete their event.

A combination of self-reflection, peer assessment, and teacher assessment in both formative and summative ways is established for students to learn from each others’ experience. That is, every two to three weeks, each student reflects upon his/her individual role within the group using the journal entry tool of the university’s Virtual Learning Environment three days before the next class-meeting. Afterwards, each student conducts a peer rating of the other members in their group. Finally, on the day of the class-meeting students, together with the teachers, discuss the results of the self-reflection and peer assessment as well as the general progress of the event. As a result, learning satisfaction scores increased significantly and overall the nine events that were organised were profitable.