Marginalisation of student cultural identity in Australian music classes is being reinforced through prescriptive composition tasks that regularly exclude non-Western influences. A compliance versus creativity approach has developed in response to limited curriculum time, summative assessing and reporting requirements and a fundamentally flawed understanding of assessing creativity which now sees many composition assessment tasks being reduced to a checklist. Additionally, musical judgements are being overlooked as a result of inflexible and prescriptive task requirements that focus on organisational matters and task completion but fail to promote creativity and ignore student cultural and social diversity. The researcher hypothesises that transforming composition assessment through design-based learning strategies, logic models and typology of talk rubrics will improve creativity and address issues of diversity. The study investigated how other knowledge domains approach assessing creativity; how the skills, passions and cultural knowledge that each individual brings can form a part of the creative process and how these approaches may be applied to music composition. An extensive literature review and document analysis were conducted with research into assessing creativity in other educational contexts examined and assessment tasks collected and analysed from schools across Australia. Literature from Engineering and Science highlight an approach that provides opportunity for renegotiating tasks that are grounded and contextualised in real narratives of experience and are iterative in nature and where a typology of talk rubric is employed for students to discuss their intention, their approach and their understanding of the process. This approach was incongruent with document analysis findings which confirmed a checklist style task construction for composition assessment, where elements of music were regularly prescribed. In most cases; form, tonality, harmony, metre, rhythmic elements, instrumentation and even the length of composition where determined by the task requirements. In particular, prescribing tonality and harmony restrict student capacity to compose from their cultural experiences. Rethinking composition as a formative measure of student learning will allow for differentiation and diversity where the teacher can address the composition process with the student on an individual basis. Removing the checklist style restrictions will permit students to compose from their cultural heritage and therefore support diversity within the classroom. Further implications for a more iterative approach for students highlight improved reflective practice and an improvement in self-efficacy as students reconsider failure and develop skills to receive feedback, make changes and resubmit. For teachers, this form of assessment provides opportunities to deliver interventions, workshops and skills development.