In Osaka last month, I heard the most important critique of performance-based assessment at scale. It came from a student: "If we connect inquiry to university admissions, won't we just create a new version of test prep?" The answer is yes. That is the core issue of making anything high-stakes. Corruption follows. HSCred was designed with that corruption in mind. 

Teaching to project-based learning is a major step up from teaching to a standardized test. But a step forward is not the final step to some nirvana state. The student in Osaka imagined "探究塾"—inquiry cram schools—where parents with money could buy an advantage for their kids. Coaches would help students produce artifacts that look impressive but reflect rehearsed performance rather than genuine thinking. The work becomes theater. 

Japan is living this dilemma in real time. Every public high school student now participates in "Period for Integrated Inquiry"—a national curriculum requirement. But when inquiry "counts," Japan fears a market will emerge to game it. So they don't grade it. They require it, but don't evaluate it. As a result, 99 percent of coursework remains rows of chairs practicing for standardized exams. Inquiry floats in a protected bubble, entirely disconnected from anything that matters for college entry.

New York State is walking toward the same wall from the opposite direction. The state's Portrait of a Graduate initiative declares that students should demonstrate competencies through authentic work, but the implementation remains unwritten. Different systems, same design problem. In America, instead of leaving work ungraded like Japan, we create elaborate compliance systems. Schools track dozens of discrete competencies, administrators mandate documentation protocols, and paperwork multiplies. The artifacts become secondary to the tracking. Administrative theater instead of cram-school theater.

The teacher who followed up on the student's question was more forceful. She was certain we would destroy inquiry-based learning if we scaled it to meet college entry requirements. Her concern wasn't rhetorical. It was diagnostic. And it pointed toward an answer.

The problem isn't connecting inquiry to admissions. The problem is how to do this with sufficient nuance in a world that tends to corrupt over time—the way a hard disk degrades with age.

If inquiry "counts" as a teacher-judged narrative about a student's growth, gaming is unavoidable. Human bias is unavoidable. If it "counts" as a bureaucratic competency checklist, you invite compliance-driven incentives necessarily absent real learning.

But what if inquiry produces an artifact—a video, posted to a channel run by independently paid university staff? What if that artifact is evaluated by content-area experts against a public rubric? That's how you scale the incentive structure so that even when some learning gets faked, enough authentic work survives to replace test prep entirely. There will always be diagnostic tests in classroom learning to ensure content mastery. But at the culmination of learning, we should never again rely on standardized testing.

The artifact becomes the shield against corruption because it is etched into a digital format.

Here's the architecture. The first layer of defense is the student's own teacher, who ensures multiple cycles of feedback and revision. You can't send a coach or your AI to work through those revisions with a human teacher who knows your writing voice, who watched you struggle with the concept last month, who will notice if the final product doesn't match your journey. Teachers are themselves incentivized to be reliable gatekeepers—their credibility depends on it.

The second layer is three paid university evaluators who have no relationship to the student. They assess only what they see in the submitted video. The judgment is low-inference, focused on the work itself, not the student. These evaluators maintain the reputation of their university's credit channel. At $33,000 annually for reviewing six ten-minute pieces daily, they have skin in the game.

The third and most powerful layer is the public itself. Approved work is visible to anyone with a free account. The general audience provides its own check on quality, building or eroding trust in the issuing institution over time.

When a student records their thinking, the work speaks for itself. The key difference from standardized testing is the audience. Old tests were better than in-class essays because three independent evaluators read each student's work—it didn't just end up in a teacher's drawer. Now imagine the work published on a platform for all to see. This massive digitally connected audience raises the stakes for all involved. 

This isn't a new idea. It's how academic publishing works. It's how professional credentialing works in medicine, law, architecture. The applicant pays to have their work evaluated by independent reviewers, and the credential follows the artifact on the applicant’s official record.

A note on Japanese education and corruption: Educators have term limits in Japan. They are hyper-focused on the dangers that accumulate over time. All teachers, counselors, and administrators are placed by the department of education unilaterally and never allowed to stay in one building longer than four years. There was even a time when they could move you across the country, assuming you had no working spouse. In New York City, we have the opposite system—teachers earn tenure at a specific building. The Japanese approach sacrifices institutional memory for fresh perspective. Neither system is perfect, but Japan's design acknowledges something we often ignore: corruption isn't a moral failing. It's a structural inevitability that must be managed.

Here's what worries me. New York State has passed legislation. The big education conglomerates will certainly launch products to help organize student portfolios. ETS already owns mastery.org. By some miracle, HSCred is ready to onboard students just months after the legislation passed. We were thinking along similar lines for years. But this is a race. We don't need money. We need users. The question is whether we can build this for students at scale before corporate giants do it for shareholder value.

For the new mayor in New York City, there's already a working model for scaling academic video production: the Youth Journalism Coalition's J4A initiative. Their work represents exactly what earns credit on our platform. The Dept. of Ed should turn J4A into their Portrait of a Graduate implementation unit. Like all journalism, a student's video either stands up to scrutiny or it doesn't. When you start with artifacts instead of checklists, meaningful evaluation of authentic learning becomes possible.

Once students learn to record and edit their thinking for one class, they can do it for any class. The capacity builds. Suddenly you have infrastructure for authentic assessment across subject areas that doesn't require teachers to overhaul their practice or administrators to build new compliance systems. It simply asks students to capture what they learned at the end of a course in a ten-minute video of their own creation. To students today, making a video is as natural as making a PowerPoint or writing timed essays was for us.

New York Superintendents face a fork in the road as they consider Portrait of a Graduate implementation planning. One path leads to competency tracking systems—new mandates, new paperwork, new compliance burdens that consume the very teacher time needed for coaching students through difficult projects. The other path leads to a small number of high-quality artifacts with external validation. Start with student work, not frameworks.

For city leadership, this isn't just about college readiness. It's a workforce signal. Students who can investigate a problem, explain what they found, present to stakeholders, and revise under feedback—those students are ready for jobs that require judgment, communication, and the ability to produce under pressure.

The Osaka question was a gift. It named the danger before the damage was done. Japan and New York stand at the same inflection point. Both have committed to inquiry. Both face the risk of corruption. The design choices made in the next two years will determine whether inquiry becomes another gate to game—or a genuine pathway for students to demonstrate what they can do.

The answer isn't to retreat from connecting inquiry to admissions. The answer is to protect the process with the right kind of shield: artifacts, independent validation, low-inference rubrics, and an audience that can see the work for itself. Only by starting with evidence—not bureaucracy—can we scale authentic learning assessment.

The infrastructure exists at HSCred. The question now is whether the systems that need it will recognize it—and act quickly—before the testing companies launch their shareholder-driven alternatives.

Nadav Zeimer is the founder of HSCred, Inc. and a former NYC turnaround principal. He presented on performance-based assessment at Osaka University in December 2025.

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