Main page > Introduction to Assessment Design in the AI-Age > Tips & Ideas for Designing Out Opportunities for Academic Misconduct
Please note: The use of AI within teaching and learning is a rapidly developing area. This information reflects our current thinking, but please check back regularly as we will be updating the information on this page as things develop.
Tips
- Make your assessments authentic, personalised and meaningful to the students. Arnold (2020) defines authentic assessment activities as characterised by realism, cognitive challenge and evaluative judgement with relevance to self, discipline or professional community.
- Use alternatives to essays e.g. presentations or discussions/role plays. Presentations offer the chance to question students about the content.
- Require evidence of the process – regular updates/blog posts or video diary.
- Include reflective activities asking students to reflect on their own learning, giving specific contexts that AI won’t be able to reference.
- Scaffold the assessment – building it up over time.
- Avoid re-using assessments.
- Avoid generic essay titles that are easily searched with a search engine – be really specific and set a narrow context.
- Use the standard AI Use Level Descriptors so that students are clear about what is acceptable.
- Try using AI to answer your assessment brief as you develop it. If it produces something reasonable, you may need to come up with something else.
Updates to this advice
Previously, we suggested making assessments topical because the AI models are trained with data which is a few years out of date and would not know about recent events. OpenAI have announced updates to ChatGPT which mean that this advice no longer applies.
Ideas
- Periodic blog posts to evidence the process of a final essay or other ‘product’.
- Ask students to submit an early excerpt of their writing (for example, an introduction) to see writing in progress, or take a stepped approach to writing tasks.
- Observing a skill e.g. teaching, medical procedures, using machinery or lab equipment.
- Having mini-vivas to question students on their work.
- Ask students to provide a video narrative of their work and decisions made/ issues encountered etc.
- Use role play giving students real world contexts e.g. safeguarding, medical appointments, leadership tasks, marketing scenarios.
- Using real life briefs from a company with detailed requirements.
- Ask students to relate the class-based discussions to an issue or scenario.
- Ask students to fact-check and add sources to a given piece of writing.
- In tray activities – where students react to a real word issue and are then drip-fed further information and they have to adapt their responses.
- Videos or podcasts
- Reflections, journals, logs, critical incident accounts.
- Lab report – writing up an in-class experiment.
- Field trip report.
- Rough guides, posters or leaflets written for a specific audience and based on the students own lived experience.
- Creative artifacts e.g. in the arts, engineering, film production.
- Presentations or performances – again for specific audiences.