Assessment Ideas – Mitigating the Use of GenAI

Sask Polytechnic

Focusing on the process, not the product

Designing personalized authentic assessments that GenAI cannot complete effectively is important. Jason Lodge (2023) from the University of Queensland reminds us that:

While generative AI can increasingly reproduce or even surpass human performance in the production of certain artefacts, it cannot replicate the human learning journey, with all its accompanying challenges, discoveries, and moments of insight. It can simulate this journey but not replicate it. The ability to trace this journey, through the assessment of learning processes, ensures the ongoing relevance and integrity of assessment in a way that a focus on outputs cannot.

Requiring students to submit something that reveals the process they followed to create that product can help reduce the likelihood that the assignment was created by GenAI. For example, you can view the editing history in Word, or students can explain in videos.

Ask for a response to non-textual resources, such as images, diagrams, or videos.
Have students express their learning using methods other than writing (e.g., mind map, timeline, infographic, video, etc.)
Perform an in-class presentation with Q&A, perhaps even with authentic audiences (industry representatives, practitioners in the field, etc.).
Consider two-stage exams.
Have students co-create open educational resources.
Leverage tools that promote student-to-student interactions.

Ask students to discuss their own individual lived experiences in the context of course topics.
Have students to connect readings to course experiences (labs, field experiences, classroom discussions, Brightspace forums, etc.).
Encourage personalized, localized, and current connections.
Have students identify the successes and challenges they experienced through the process of project completion.
Ask students to self-assess their work.
Leverage problem-based authentic projects.
Have students to articulate their rationale for choices made throughout a project.

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