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New publication: Assessment integrity in the age of AI

Folks! I’ve written a new piece out this week in Needed Now in Learning and Teaching – check it out here:

Needed Now in Learning and Teaching
Assessment integrity in the age of AI: Where to from here?

The focus of the piece is on surveying promising strategies for ensuring higher education assessment is meaningful, valid and done with purpose in a context where all students have access to GenAI apps.

Truth is, it’s not really an AI issue. AI is giving us another reason to panic about it, but the value of university qualifications has been highly in question for years due to…

  • cohort hyperscaling
  • poorly-defined assessment standards
  • illogical credit-award mechanisms
  • lack of relationships between students and teachers
  • digital assessment platforms that erode relationships and trust
  • a fundamental mismatch between what qualifications are and how learning works.

I hope you’ll read the framing piece I wrote for Needed Now, but over the coming days I’ll also send an email with each of the three proposals for quality assessment reform. If you’re not receiving emails from this platform and you’d like to be, please hit that subscribe button up top!

This is what you’ll receive:

Proposal 1
Revise assessment standards
to re-centre the purpose of each task and enable teachers to evaluate each piece of student work in a way that fulfils that purpose.

Proposal 2
Foster educational relationships
by enabling teachers to sit beside students throughout their learning and develop a picture, not only of their achievements, but of their journeys towards them.

Proposal 3
Decouple education from qualifications
acknowledging that each plays a different role in a person’s life: one is to make meaning, and the other is to verify competence.

I hope you’ll take the time to explore these ideas, especially if you’re involved in assessment reform in universities right now. They are each incomplete and speculative, but driven by a desire to shift this conversation from securing assessment conditions to the core mission of education.

I’m not an expert; I’m a practitioner, and I’m describing the opportunities and possibilities I see. Perhaps you see more? Perhaps you see where challenges lie, or opportunities to overcome them. I want to hear from you!

5 responses to “New publication: Assessment integrity in the age of AI”

  1. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    This is such an intelligent exploration of the issues. 🧠☑️

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    1. Miriam Reynoldson Avatar
      Miriam Reynoldson

      Thanks Ben! I’m sure I haven’t captured all of the big issues… just tried to bring together all the things I was hearing and look for the longer-term themes beneath the layers of moral panic. Are there other major problems you’re seeing with HE assessment from your vantage point? (Don’t hold back!)

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      Reply
      1. Ben Lawless Avatar
        Ben Lawless

        Content validity is low. Teaching people a practical skill like teaching and then assessing them by an essay writing competition?

        the pressure to pass students because they paid you $X,000

        that we give passes for work at 50% standard, not mastery.

        lack of assessment training for people working in HE (this is a huge problem in K-12 teaching as well mind you)

        poor quality rubrics. very poor. even in places where better rubric writing guidelines were developed

        I mean you don’t need any kind of teaching qualification to teach/instruct/tutor in Australia. If that doesn’t tell you how little HE understands education!

        ———

        These are my own personal opinions not those of others or any organisations and aren’t related to any specific context.

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      2. Miriam Reynoldson Avatar
        Miriam Reynoldson

        So picking up on a couple of those things together – the pressure to “pass” students for paying, and the reality that “pass” standard is not a passable standard – how is it that they’re related? Is it coincidence or something else?

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      3. Ben Lawless Avatar
        Ben Lawless

        “Never assume malice when stupidity is more likely”. Said someone famous and wise once.

        There are definitely connections but I don’t believe that is intended.

        The continued cut in funding for universities forcing them to rely more and more on international students has made problems for the wanting to pass everyone.

        The ‘pass’ standard and lack of mastery learning is a far more common problem that just in tertiary.

        The lack of construct validity is possibly connected to funding – to properly teach and assess a performance (e.g. teaching) rather than an essay would be much more expensive.

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