How do teachers design assessment in interdisciplinary education?

Universities worldwide increasingly offer interdisciplinary learning experiences alongside traditional disciplinary curricula, yet there is limited empirical attention to how teachers design interdisciplinary assessments to facilitate and evaluate student learning. We ask how universities can assess interdisciplinary learning in ways that make its proclaimed value demonstrable. Drawing on 70 course syllabi and 57 teacher interviews from an interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum in Hong Kong, we examine what is assessed, how it is assessed, and why. Our findings show how varied and contested ideas about interdisciplinarity become embedded in concrete assessment tasks and student guidance. Teachers articulate diverse learning objectives and adopt differing assessment practices as they negotiate the epistemic demands of interdisciplinarity, institutional expectations, disciplinary norms and cultures, and their own judgements about students’ readiness for integrative work. This divergence produces varying degrees of interdisciplinarity across assessment designs, generating a rich yet sometimes fragmented assessment landscape that constrains coherence while opening up possibilities for innovation. We argue that assessment is a generative site in which the meaning and value of interdisciplinarity are actively constituted. As such, assessment decisions shape what counts as legitimate interdisciplinary learning and influence students’ development of integrative understanding, epistemic agency, and their capacity to address complex real-world problems.