I don't like using the word "creative" when thinking of designing assessment or any kind of instruction. "Creative" is too often confused with "imaginative" and is used as a catch-all for "thinking outside the box." All of which are incredibly vague terms to describe a process, let alone an assessment.

But I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that "creative" be synonomous with "Make Something." It can literally be anything besides a paper/pencil test. A paper, a catapult, a musical composition, a play, a video montage, a new sport, a review of a comic book, a civil war reinactment. 

Some memory recall skills are starting to become obsolete because most people carry all the information of the world in their pockets so assessing whether or not a student has a formula or a set of dates memorized is kind of pointless. So the process of assessment must be something beyond what our students can look up on their phones. It's almost as if the first two steps of Bloom's Taxonomy (Knowledge, Comprehension) are being replaced by "Google" and "Search Engine Methods."

This means they must make something to ensure the application/analysis/synthesis/evaluation of the stuff they can just look up is of quality. Do they know how to formulate questions when all the easy answers are just a click away?

In order to ensure this, we must ask the students to "make something" in order for an assessment to really mean anything beyond fact regurgitation. What are some ways you have had students make something for an assessment as an alternative to the traditional approaches? How have your students responded to creating something as opposed to filling out something?