AI and Authentic Assessments: Preparing Students for an AI-Enabled World

AI-integrated assessments make GenAI a core part of the assessment. AI-resistant assessments are the opposite and focus on the students’ ability to demonstrate the course’s foundational learning and skills without the use of GenAI tools.

Considerations:

When designing AI-resistant assessments, there are a few things that you should consider:

• How can you control or limit AI use? Examples include in-person assessments without technology, or browser blockers for at home tests.
• Is this an authentic assessment? What are the real-world times where students will have to apply the course-based outcomes without AI?
• Is there value in removing student access to AI, or would the assessment be more authentic as an AI-integrated assessment?
• How will I be sure that the student has learned the foundational skills and knowledge of this course?

Examples of AI-resistant assessments include:

1.  An oral exam or a closed-book exam
2.  Any pen and paper assignments
3.  Hands-on work in the field or lab
4.  A role-play or simulation activity

It is worth noting that when thinking about how we assess our students, we want to provide multiple smaller tasks rather than one or two larger projects for a fairer assessment. To learn more about assessment best practices, you can read the USask assessment principles page.

AI-combination assessment:

AI-combination assessments, as the name suggests, combine AI-integrated activities with AI-resistant activities. By doing this, we can create authentic assessments that reflect the real-world and help our students to prepare for life after graduation. Below are two examples, but the possibilities are endless. For example, there are numerous oral assessment activities that could also work.

Example 1: Client Meeting

• Many of our students will enter a workforce where they are expected to engage with a client in some form (accountant/client, nurse/patient, teacher/student, etc.).

• Have the students partner with a peer and participate in a role-play exercise showing this client interaction. One partner would take on the role of the professional (example: nurse) and the other partner would take on the role of the client (example: patient). Both roles should take pen and paper notes.

• Following the role-play, both partners will take their role-play notes home and use GenAI to help them analyze the notes looking for common themes or details they might have missed. The GenAI could summarize the notes and help the students prepare for a follow-up meeting. The clients[MJ4]  should use this time to prepare some challenging and unexpected questions for the follow-up meeting to really test their partners' foundational, course-based knowledge.

• This second role-play happens the following day, in-person, the same as the first role-play session.

This assessment activity allows room for both AI-resistant (the role-play sessions) and AI-integrated (the at home work with the notes), as well as formative (observing the role-play) and summative (reading any sort of follow-up report/detailed summary of the role-play) assessment. It creates an authentic task that students are likely to experience in the real-world.

Example 2: Presentation

• Students will prepare a presentation using GenAI to help them find resources, write the content, and could even use GenAI to build the slides for them.

• Students bring their presentations to class and deliver an in-class presentation.

• The students will then have to respond, live, to challenging and unexpected questions from the instructor (and possibly from other students) that the presenter will have to answer without the use of technology to prove that they still have a strong understanding of the foundational skills and knowledge from the course.

This assessment activity allows room for both AI-resistant (the in-class presentation) and AI-integrated (building the presentation) learning activities. It also has room for both summative (the research behind the presentation) and formative (the live presentation skills) assessment. It creates an authentic task that students are likely to experience in the real-world.

Bringing it all together

If you read all five articles in this series that answers the question: “AI exists, now what?” then you understand there is a lot to consider in our GenAI-enabled world. Our students want to learn the material that our courses offer so that they are ready for the life post-graduation, and students also want to learn how they can use GenAI to assist them in their chosen field. We need to start building more AI content into our courses without it overshadowing our foundational skills and knowledge. By using a variety of assessment techniques, we can be confident that our students have the skills they need for the post-graduation, GenAI-enabled world.

 

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Article Series - "AI exists, now what?"

This article is part of a series that aims to assist educators understand the world of GenAI and will offer suggestions on how to bring it into learning environments, answering the question: AI exists, now what?

1. AI is Here and You Can ACE It
2. AI and Academic Integrity: How are students using AI and how do we clarify expectations?
3. Being Transparent With AI Use: How To Cite, Disclose, and Document
4. Designing Assessments that Leverage AI
5. AI and Authentic Assessments: Preparing Students for an AI-Enabled World

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^{Title image credit: BC Gov Photos on Flickr
This article was created with the assistance of AI tools, as described in the GMCTL AI Disclosure Statement.}

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.