From as early as next term, Year 12 students in New South Wales could be barred from undertaking take-home assessments as part of their Higher School Certificate Studies. The first cohort to be affected would be the Year 12 cohort for 2027.
I can understand the reasoning behind the decision - that students have increasingly outsourced assessment tasks to Artifcial Intelligence (AI) and that as a result, students wont develop skills in knowledge, critical thinking but also the ability to locate, select and communicate information. Ultimately it affects the originality of the work submitted; it is not a true reflection of what the student really knows or can demonstrate.
I was reminded of a conversation I had with an English Teacher last year. They knew the students had used AI to prepare their work but couldnt mark their work down, as they could not prove that the work submitted was not truely a students own work. It was a case of there was "nothing that they could do".
But a different conversation this week also got me thinking too. If universities are now encouraging or supporting the use of AI (as long as its within appropriate and ethical boundaries), shouldn't students be entitled to the same, not to mention the need to be educated on it?
Schools have also begun implementing their own approaches or strategies to encourage the responsible use of AI in assessment tasks. Some even require students to record when AI was used and how it was used to construct their work as proof of originality.
There was a teacher at my school last year, who asked her students to assess whether or not an AI generated essay would conform to the marking criteria for a question. The students discovered that AI may look on the surface to provide them the perfect essay, but didn't necessarily answer the question. This is like university students who pay others to prepare an essay but still dont receive full marks because the work didnt answer the question.
I do think we need to educate our students on responsible use of AI, especially as teacher librarians. AI can help in many ways e.g. helping one to organise information, organise notes, provide scaffolds, proof read written work. Shouldnt we encourage it if it helps us collect information and help us organise it. I think even keeping records of chats etc in a chatbot can help. At the end of the day, one should not rely on a chatbot to do all the writing
