Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning

More than twenty years ago, leading scholar-practitioners authored a set of Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning to provide universities and colleges a starting point for conversations about assessment as a primary tool for improving student learning. Universities and colleges across the nation and around the world continue to return to these principles as conversation-catalysts and heuristics for planning. 

In 2025, the Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE) published an updated version of the principles. 

The development of A.C.C.E.L.E.R.A.T.E. (the ten principles of assessment best practice, also known as ACCELERATE) emerged from revisiting and reviewing of the original Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning (AAHE, 1992, 1996). It began as an annual strategic initiative of the 2024-25 President of the Association for Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE), Dr. Constance Tucker. The original nine principles were reviewed by groups of assessment scholars and practitioners to discern the relevance and endurance of those principles to meet today’s evolving educational contexts while also considering whether they could support the advancement and bolstering of the field of practice of assessment as a whole. Inviting several assessment scholars, professionals, and leaders in the organization and the field, and in consultation with several authors of the original nine principles, over the course of nine months, ACCELERATE emerged and evolved into the current set of ten best practices growing out of collaborative and co-creative conversations, thinking, research, feedback, input-seeking, and idea generation across various fora and sources.