Regulator says AI makes assessing university coursework 'close to impossible'
AI has made it ‘close to impossible’ to assess university coursework. Another destructive consequence of AI. In credentials obsessed societies, too many want degree certificates without the hard graft of learning. It is back to traditional in-person presentations, vivas and traditional exams.
Freckles17Students submitting ideas they haven't had, possibly don't fully comprehend or even agree with and loading themselves with debt in order to get a qualification carrying less and less weight . A neoliberal triumph.
Yrotitna11I’m struggling to understand why anyone would pay £9500 a year to go to university only to avoid having to think for themselves.
DW10Yep, there's nothing like the fear of a blank piece of paper, pen in hand & looking at a set of exam questions with 2hrs ticking away on the clock, to concentrate the mind
Cassandra 🏴🇪🇺🌐7Good. Vivas etc are personnel-intensive tasks. Good for employees.
Clodia bach4In my and my son’s industries (legal and programming respectively), AI creates so many errors that I have banned it in my job and my son is sick of all the contracts he’s getting to clean up AI slop. LLM’s regurgitate the crap they find and too many people trust it.
nicholasbannan.bsky.social4We need to go back to handwritten, sit-down timed exams!
Cab Davidson20This goes back a long way. Year after tuition fees came in I was assisting in lab practicals for undergrad microbiologists, it was suddenly transactional. "Will this be on the exam?" has been, from that point on, the question. We made education a transaction, and the cost has been spectacular.
Dreamliner Again11There’s a really annoying ad for an AI-enabled phone that I keep seeing. A young woman is overwhelmed by the reading she’s doing for a job interview. So she feeds it all to the LLM and asks if for help with the interview. This isn’t how humans *learn*. FFS.
Alexander Lees9Very pleased to see the wicked problem of AI and assessment in universities getting more publicity - this was my written submission to the UK government's call for evidence in May this year: committees.parliament.uk/writtenevide...
Lunatraktors2This really is a fork in the road: Genuine learning with one-to-one tutorials, small group seminars, and critical discussion. OR The for-profit university, where 'knowledge transfer' is automated, modules are transferable, taught in bulk, and both staff and students rely on AI.
‘The regulator warned universities and other higher education institutions that failing to design “valid and reliable measures of students’ knowledge and skills” to combat AI could breach their conditions of registration and lead to sanctions being imposed.’
Rob Aitken8There are two obvious solutions. 1. A return to closed exams and 2. coursework (eg dissertation) where the supervisor is the examiner and reads drafts and discusses them with the student so they can see how the students ideas are developing. However both are more labour intensive for academic staff.
tinarororo.bsky.social1learning technologists were saying this years before the regulator got involved.
Jonathan Clarke1Just reread the article and a similar write up in the FT; it’s worrying how ill informed the OfS is. There are loads of forms of ‘coursework’ that AI is crap at. Massive potential for losing a lot of the authentic assessment that we have developing by just going for exams and regurgitating stuff.
Jonathan Clarke1I think there are still novel assessments that AI isn’t very good at replicating and can be spotted by markers with time. A lot of the ‘solutions’ people are proposing are unpopular with students and like it or not, we are increasingly in a customer service business.
Stephen Bush227A lot of academics really need to wake up and accept that “but the AI-proof methods of assessment are worse!” is true but basically irrelevant.
Dr Chris Smith32The OfS needs to be disbanded. It was never fit for purpose and is clearly led and staffed by people who have no idea how universities actually work, how teaching is done, or how students are assessed. Nor have they thought through their demand, which is essentially impossible.
Jo Wolff22Ok, here’s what happens. A problem arises. Every department comes up with a solution that suits its needs. Months later the faculty mandates a general solution that doesn’t work so well for anyone. Even later the university comes up with something worse. Years later the regulator even worse.
Sarah May19So. Yes, earlier we told you that you have to integrate 'AI skills' into all courses so that students are 'workplace ready' but also you will be sanctioned if students actually use AI. Got it.
Meryl Kenny8Staff I think are generally onboard with this, but one of the (many) consequences of the current HE crisis is unis actively blocking the move (back) towards in-person examinations on the grounds of ‘cost’ and resource, despite the very clear writing on the wall.
Philip Cowley8Blindingly obvious to anyone actually marking student work. (So I hear, anyway. Am sure no students at QM are cheating like this. But it's rife everywhere else)
abbi6Cannot believe that I've never seen a Learning Designer or Digital Education Specialist quoted in any of these articles ever, even though we are employed by every UK university precisely to navigate issues like this.
Grumpy Philosopher6Super, AI use forces broke, understaffed universities to adopt more expensive and labour intensive forms of assessment.
Hisham Zerriffi5A clear example of how GenAI is affecting higher ed. Changes in assessment are being driven by making them AI proof rather than starting with what is best for student learning. The fact that the regulator in the UK is threatening sanctions just takes it to next level.
Terry O'Connor4So 'regulators' are evidently incapable of regulating e.g. water companies or broadcasters, yet are able to 'regulate' universities to mitigate a near-impossible situation not of their making? Have I understood that correctly?
“Coursework is now overwhelmingly written in part, or exclusively, with the help of AI.” What I find so shocking about the breakdown in academic ethics around AI is that it is *almost total*, more like a realignment of human nature than a normal ethical slide www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Dr Francis Young21You’ll never get 100% adherence to ethics and a minority of people (sometimes a large minority) will always chance their arm, but surely a *total* abandonment of ethics in one area of life is unusual. I suppose the epidemic of music piracy in the early 2000s comes closest?
12 Spoons 🇺🇦2When i was at university I sat actual exam papers....just a thought
Cathal2They don't call it accelerationism for nothing. It's still dispiriting to hear that standards are slipping so easily and so quickly. People are supposed to enjoy reading and writing. It's quite a fulfilling thing to do, y'know?
Martin John5I'm breaking myself writing non-AI work for school--and the young writers I'm writing along with, at least in our writing program, are entirely against AI usage.
Philip Amies3Music piracy did not start in the 2000s, it became easy and standard with tape cassettes to tape radio music, I suppose some did with reel tapes, not sure about economics as regards cost of a record vs tapes and machine. The machines were legal, AI is legal and receiving immense capital investment.
Dylan2AI in academia, like the complete ubiquity of online dating, is something I feel like I fundamentally can't grasp by virtue of not being there as it's happened.
We're chronically and severely underfunded. Where are the resources and staff necessary for a wholesale switch over to viva assessment going to come from?!! www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Bijan Parsia11I think it’s been over a year since I mattered of factly pointed out in our Senate that the biggest threat to our degree quality was AI and people were surprised. I was surprised at their surprise!!!
Durham UCU10It's worth making the more general point here too, perhaps - universities are trying to push this problem onto departments as much as possible. "We don't know how your discipline can AI-proof itself; sort that out between you". This would be an unwise approach even at the best of times...
Dr Matilda Fitzmaurice4New thing that's the fault of universities: AI
Universities have encouraged the use of AI by students, with permissive frameworks they expected students to abide by, and at the same time increased student numbers and made thousands of staff redundant. Are we supposed to do multiple vivas for all our 700 undergraduates in our spare time?
Alison Stenning10AI in assessments is undoubtedly something we have to get our heads round, but our job would have been easier if universities hadn’t so enthusiastically embraced it, without any real critical thought.
TSinghmorethanl1Bureaucracy led Universities exploited ai Now cry foul They saved on people by using automation Their courses can't discriminate quality They complain Instead think about what is needed, how to get there, what is unique, & how to create a learner that goes beyond the confines of the material.
Eric Gordy3The answer to every question is to increase workload for staff while running down their numbers.
Lucy Pearson2Everything Alison said. Also, this would be a lot easier to navigate if we didn't have students shaped by an education system which is relentlessly assessment driven at the expense of deep engagement with learning as a process.
My solution to the AI coursework issue: typewriters. Still readable for the tutors; doesn't have to be timed or controlled. Sure, someone probably will type out a transcript of an AI output, but that's probably more soul-destroying than doing the actual work.
Andrew R11Do you happen to have a garage full of old daisywheel printers that you're looking to sell to students at a vast profit?
James3Do they still make Tippex?
kyra BOO!ney-cross’ PR manager🎃🎃2also fun because machine go click clack click clack
Rich1all students must use landlines
Fantaloupe 1Somebody in a meeting made a similar suggestion except they were requiring handwritten submission. A brief search found three sites with free text to handwriting conversions. Afraid typewriter fonts with jitter to mimic "reality" have also been around for ages.
Interested to see how HE management responds to this report from the OFS. There is currently substantial resistance to in-person assessment. www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Stephen, some of us have been actively fighting for the universities to change. I want in-person hand-written exams. I want oral presentations. I want to have vivas after coursework. I want to be able to penalise AI use severely. We keep being told 'no'. Partly because of cost...
Paul Bernal7...and partly because the universities have gone so far into bed with the AI companies that they're afraid to take a positive stance. Either way, it's terrible, but it's mostly the administrators, not the academics, who are the barriers. The VCs most of all.
Stephen Bush5I didn't say you weren't. I said 'some academics' for a reason. Demonstrably as you can see from my replies some academics are in denial about it, some aren't.
Leon Black3we're reintroducing vivas for final-year projects this year (can't remember if I've said this before). It should be, erm, interesting.
