Authentic Assessment: Reexamine How You Know What Your Students Can Do

Joseph Kennedy:

The huge positive of ChatGPT and generative AI, and it is very hard. I want to acknowledge that for faculty members, it’s very hard to deal with this. We’re coming off the pandemic. Generative AI is as disruptive to assessment as the pandemic was to the entire educational experience. And so we’re saying to faculty members, you just dealt with something that profoundly changed everything about your career. Congratulations, you have to do it again. But what Jeff is saying is, his solution is to actually go back to what the point of assessment is, and Jeff is using this potential cheating tool, this potential roadblock instead as a chance to reexamine how he knows what his students know and can do. And so the students are coming out better for it. So I would say, Jeff, you may not be addressing how do I prompt engineer in ChatGPT, but you are addressing what’s at the heart of it to begin with.

Jeff Przybylo:

Yeah, I think I agree with you and I think what’s really happening is I’m just not saying it out loud in front of them and not yet teaching them how to use it effectively, because I think that’s where we need to go. We can’t just be policing it, we have to teach.