AI Sheds Light on Assessment Weaknesses

Derek Bruff:

I think part of what’s happening is that these generative AI technologies are shedding a light on certain types of assessments we regularly use that were not very interesting or powerful to begin with, and now the tools can do them for us.

And so I’ll share one more quote here, it’s on my last slide. This is from Ted Underwood who does a lot of work on AI and linguistics. “We will also need to devise new kinds of questions for advanced students, questions that are hard to answer even with AI assistance because no one knows what the answer is yet. These are assignments of a more demanding kind than we have typically handed undergrads, but that’s the point. Some things are actually easier now and colleges may have to stretch students further in order to challenge them.” That’s kind of a hard thing to hear, but I think it’s important and I think that these technologies are changing what’s expected of our students when they graduate, and so we need to be responsive to that. I think honestly the instructors that are going to have the hardest time are the ones who are doing fully asynchronous online courses.

Those have traditionally depended so much on writing assignments, small writing assignments. And if you’re not, it’s just so tempting for students to just shortcut that with tools. So those are the courses that I think need perhaps some of the biggest course redesign