An aggressive, uncompromising wave of assessment security has swept Australian higher education, as a number of pundits have decided to go all in on a narrow view of higher education as about the verification of competence in the current uncertain period of possibly vast AI fraud.

Because, in universities, everyone has near-limitless access to a handful of large language models (including the licenses funded by the institutions themselves), nobody’s work can be confidently considered their own. (For example, as a Monash sessional and RMIT graduate researcher I have paid subscription access to Copilot, Google Gemini, Notebook LM and ChatGPT in an RMIT-branded wrapper. I did promise not to use them, but I wouldn’t blame you for doubting me.)

It’s being argued that this only counts as inappropriate behaviour for students, not academic faculty – the stakes are different, so the standards are different, they claim. You know, because students might use GenAI to fraudulently gain credit towards their degrees, while academics could only use it to pollute the entire corpus of digitally-available scientific knowledge including its backdated citation records.

As a result, we need to invest vast resources into (stop me if you’ve heard this before) the rigid categorisation of all university assessment tasks into either “lane one” (in-person tests of skill under controlled conditions to prevent or boundarise the use of GenAI) or “lane two” (unsupervised formative tasks for which methods can be recommended, but really students can undertake them using whatever resources they like).

The ultimate outcome of this elegant scheme: higher education assessments will be configured in a way that confidently verifies students’ own honest efforts in completing their assessments and earning their degrees. The integrity of university qualifications will be preserved; society’s respect for higher education will prevail.

Boys. Fellas. Lads. First of all, the world is literally burning. We are past many critical thresholds towards climate catastrophe. Global society is in political turmoil. As I might have mentioned, the digital corpus of academic publishing is now saturated with AI-generated slop. Journal editors are throwing up their hands in despair, overwhelmed with unmanageable quantities of mediocre and possibly fictional research write-ups, AI-generated “frankencitations”, not to mention a shocking homogenisation of topic foci towards AI-centric inquiry. There are enormous real problems and instead we are overwhelmingly funding hobbyist research into speculative applications of a technology suite that has demonstrated very few (I’m not saying zero) meaningful use cases.

In short, there are forms of value that our universities could be focusing on that matter a little more than their internal testing procedures.

For many students, assessment results will barely rate a mention in the (considerable) list of values created through their university educations. I, for example, spent my Bachelor of Arts degree founding a film club, finding belonging with the campus queer community, publishing my first stories and media reviews, coordinating a student fiction contest, exploring my identity as a newly minted adult, and learning to live independently in a crappy sharehouse near campus. And look, I was privileged as hell – a naturally gifted writer and historically high achiever, studying at a time when campus-adjacent sharehouse rent was less than $100 a week. My time at university was – could afford to be – a time of becoming, not simply a time of earning. I didn’t ever cheat on my exams or essays, but I got quite a lot of Cs.

I was also culturally aware enough to understand that the grades my teachers assigned were not facts but opinions about my abilities. Grading – no matter how prescriptive the rubric – is not an objective process. The teachers who liked my work gave me higher marks than those who didn’t, and I learned to gauge what kinds of work they liked by paying attention to what they promoted in their teaching. That didn’t mean I always did what they liked. Sometimes I did what I liked, because my values were different from theirs. And I learned along the way to make peace with mediocre grades, recognising them as the low, low price of this freedom. This is evaluative judgement – understanding the criteria upon which value judgements are made, how they are formed, how they differ from judge to judge, and why. And, most importantly, applying that understanding to inform – but not dictate – our own values and choices.

My university education was not competency-based. It was not about getting qualified to do a job. I know I chose a study path quite different from many of those that need to be ultimately judged to professional standards, like nursing, engineering and accounting. I’m not under the illusion that all university experiences are (or were, in some imagined nostalgic past) like mine. Something I do find troubling, though, is how the assessment security discourse seems to position all university assessment as requiring the same unified treatment (at least, judging by all those appeals about markets crashing and patients being hospitalised because business and medical students used GenAI on their assessments).

Is this because our leaders imagine that the social sciences, humanities and arts will or should be ejected from university offerings? Or is it because they only studied functionalist disciplines themselves and can imagine no other standard? Or perhaps it’s simply because they need an argument emotive enough to push forward the sales pitch and monopolise all of Australian education with a single approach.

I’ve been holding my tongue on this for a while. This is a politically sensitive issue and one with deep links to cults of privilege and the myth of meritocracy in higher education. I could go on about the fallacy of “securing” assessment in the context of profound cultural and economic inequality, sophisticated and advancing wearable technologies, assessor subjectivity, and misalignment with workforce conditions… but today that’s not my point.

My point is simply that competency-based assessment is not university education. If it were, we should abandon all of these schemes and adopt the rich framework of assessment quality and integrity developed for the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector, in which nobody needed to be taught about authentic assessment, constructive alignment or validity, because in VET, those are like water to a fish.

I don’t actually think anyone (and certainly not those pushing the assessment security barrow) want higher education to become VET. Not least because the pay differential is rather punishing. Practice-aligned vocational education is vital, and I am passionate about it – though its governance and execution could be vastly improved – but university’s value is something different. I have always thought it a terrible shame that degrees are awarded solely on the basis of credit awarded for assessments completed, because if that was all someone got out of their university experience, it would have been years and many thousands of dollars too many for the privilege of getting tested.