Designing Assessments that Leverage GenAI

When students sign up for a course, they hope that it will give them the skills and knowledge that they will need to be successful in their chosen field, and as subject matter experts, educators design courses to do exactly that. However, a new challenge presents itself: acknowledging that when students graduate, they will be working in a world and field that is integrated with GenAI. That means, to help prepare students for a GenAI-enabled world, instructors should start thinking about how to provide opportunities for students to leverage GenAI through authentic tasks and experiential learning.

Get Started

• Teach the ACE model
• Understand how students may want to use GenAI
• Teach students about GenAI with the USask Library AI learning module
• Teach students to be transparent with their GenAI use and how to use it responsibly. The USask Library shares a very in-depth guide around responsible AI use including a section on ethical responsibility.
• Use frameworks as examples to help teach prompting
• USask Library’s ACCURATE-LE
• CREATE or CLEAR frameworks

Considerations

There are a lot of great ideas out there already that you can use or remix. But when starting from scratch, here are some things to consider:

• Will this assessment task require students to use GenAI to modify existing content or to generate new content? If generating new content, how will the student engage with that content?
• Does the task provide scaffolding to encourage students to critically evaluate their GenAI use and to question the prompts, understanding that as the human driver of the GenAI, it is their responsibility to ensure the outputs are accurate and relevant?
• Does your task distract from the foundational skills of the course? Remember, even when designing a task to teach and develop GenAI knowledge and skills, your course likely is not a GenAI course (unless it is, then disregard this point). Make sure the focus is still on your course outcomes.
• What are the “real-world” applications of GenAI that the students will be expected to use after they graduate? Is this an authentic assessment that is preparing them for success in an GenAI-enabled world.

Don’t forget the basic principles of assessment design. While focused on exams, many of the ideas in this refresher article are still relevant.

Examples

1. Have the GenAI write a paper or argument defending a relevant opinion within your field. Have the students engage with this piece of work and find flaws in its arguments.
2. Have the students read an article and write a reflection (link to Enhancing Reflective Practice in the Age of AI) on the article. Have GenAI do the same task and then have the students compare their reflection with AI’s reflection.
3. Allow the students to make full use of GenAI from start to finish including:
   • Brainstorm ideas
   • Generate sources
   • Create a project outline
   • Help with writing, editing, and formatting
   • Make slides for presentation

These are great examples of how we can leverage Gen-AI, but remember, the focus still needs to be on the course’s foundational skills and knowledge. In the final article of this five-part series, we will explore AI-Resistant learning and discuss a potential middle ground that allows instructors to really put their students’ skills to the test.

Further Reading
The following links are excellent examples if you want to see how other higher education instructors are using GenAI tools in their learning environments:

• AI Pedagogy Project - metaLAB (at) Harvard
• AI Prompts for Teaching: A spell book
• 101 Ideas to Use AI in Education

 

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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.