Rethinking Assessment

The rise of generative AI has changed the rules of the game for education. Traditional assessments—long essays, take-home assignments, and standardised reports—can now be completed with the help of tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in minutes. This raises an urgent question for educators:

How can we ensure assessments still measure genuine student learning?

The New Paradigm: Process-Driven Assessment

Modern assessment design needs to:

• Integrate the learning process into the task – require students to show drafts, logs, prompts used, and reflections.
• Make thinking visible – through viva voce interviews, oral presentations, or in-class checkpoints.
• Embrace authentic contexts – tasks grounded in real-world problems, case studies, or student experience.
• Incorporate AI transparently – when permitted, require students to document how AI was used and critically evaluate its outputs.

Practical Redesign StrategiesKey Insights:

Drawing from UNSW’s self-audit framework and TEQSA’s AI assessment principles, educators can:

1. Link assessments across the course
   – Make tasks build on each other so abrupt style changes are easier to detect.
2. Require reflection and justification
   – Have students explain their decision-making, not just present the result.
3. Use mixed formats
   – Combine written, oral, practical, and collaborative elements.
4. Test vulnerability against AI
   – Run your questions through AI tools before setting them to see how easily they can be solved.
5. Design for authenticity
   – Situate tasks in contexts where personal insights, lived experience, or unique data sources are essential.

The Opportunity

Generative AI isn’t the end of academic integrity—it’s the push we needed to design better, richer assessments. By shifting from “Can the student produce the right answer?” to “Can the student show and defend how they got there?”, we foster critical thinking, adaptability, and lifelong learning skills.

This isn’t about outsmarting AI. It’s about making human thinking, creativity, and judgment the irreplaceable core of assessment.

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