A presentation on what authentic assessment may look like in a post ChatGPT world. Presented on the 26 July to an Educational Design Workshop held at Charles Darwin University. His ten priorities for assessment include: - Reduce emphasis on final high-stakes exams - Reduce propensity for wide-spread quizzes for key assessments - Look for opportunities for program-wide assessments (alignment across units) - Weight assessment aligned with level of learning - Increase emphasis on formative feedback for learning (feedback literacy) - Designing active, collaborative, authentic assessment - Increase the use of WIL, group and peer assessment - Increase ‘assessment for inclusion’ Increased use of multimodal assessment - Reduce essays and long form text that can be easily cheated

1. CRICOS Provider No: 00300K (NT/VIC) 03286A (NSW) RTO Provider No: 0373 TEQSA Provider ID PRV12069
Principles of Assessment
Higher Education Course Design Program
Professor Michael Sankey
Director, Learning Futures and Lead Education Architect
President, Australasian Council on Open Distance and eLearning (ACODE)
Community Fellow, Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE)
michael_sankey

2. Charles Darwin University acknowledges all
First Nations people across the lands on
which we live and work, and we pay our
respects to Elders both past and present.
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That is:
• First and foremost, it’s about helping
our students form an understanding of
their subject matter
• Building their confidence
• It’s not about trying to catch them out
• If we do find that they don’t know
something, we help build a bridge for
them (formative feedback).

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5. 10 CDU priorities for assessment
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• Reduce emphasis on final high-stakes exams
• Reduce propensity for wide-spread quizzes for important assessments
• Look for opportunities for course-wide assessments (alignment across units)
• Weight assessment items aligned with level of learning (low for low-stakes)
• Increase emphasis on formative assessment feedback ‘for learning’ (feedback
literacy)
• Designing active, collaborative, authentic assessment
• Increase the use of WIL, group and peer assessment
• Assessment for inclusion
• Increased use of multimodal assessments
• Reduce essays and long form text that can be easily cheated

6. 1.Exams should be closed book.
2.Students should only take a specific set of
notes/pages/texts into exams.
3.A task must be responded to in a particular mode,
most often written, such as an essay.
4.There must be strict time parameters for assessments
such as exams.
5.Tasks cannot be substituted, even if alternatives
equally assure learning outcomes from those
designed
6.The linguistic standards required are those of a
sophisticated first language speaker
7.Inflexible deadlines for assessment must always be
adhered to.
8.Students will be able to operate assessment
technology with ease.
Common assumption about assessment
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07294360.2022.2057451

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• Learnline (Bb Ultra)
• MS Teams
• Bb Ally
• Bb Collaborate
• Zoom/Teams
• FeedbackFruits
• Kaltura
• Padlet
• PebblePad
• Respondus Lockdown
Browser & Monitor
• Turnitin & SafeAssign
• VoiceThread

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10. • 34% have made no changes
• 36% have made some
minor changes.
• Encouragingly (though
still small) 17% have either
made major changes to,
or have completely
changed their approach.
Q3 - Have you made any significant changes to your
current approach to assessment in your units?
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12. • ChatGPT and similar technologies are useful tool, generating
content and ideas to help get words on the page.
• Misinformation is serious. So, we teach students how to use it,
how to understand its limitations, and to fact-check its outputs.
• Just as we teach students how to read critically, how to
evaluate and corroborate evidence, and how to distinguish
good arguments from bad and recognise rubbish.
• But, we don’t want to put Gen AI at the centre of education.
Teaching students how to use Generative AI
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13. • AI provides instant feedback on students’ writing, simplify
complex information and scaffold information on specific task
• It’s helpful for neurodivergent students or students with English
as a second language
• Students struggling to understand concepts can ask AI to
provide examples to aid their understanding.
• The use of AI by students pivots them from being consumers of
learning materials to creators of their own learning resources.
Students can become creators
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14. • The onus is on us to design assessments relevant to students’
future careers, so the value proposition For AI is diminished
• By clarifying the purpose of tasks in relation to their development,
we can encourage learners to engage with their learning
• Let’s not fool ourselves students will turn to AI, when things start
getting though, so additional strategies are needed.
Continue to design ‘authentic’ assessments
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15. • A key concern is that students won’t actually understand what they
have submitted.
• So, we balance written work with other kinds of assessments., such as
In-person oral presentations (viva’s) that cannot be produced by AI.
• Supplementing essays with other assessments need not come at the
expense of good assessment design.
• There’s good reasons to vary written work with other forms of
assessment; e.g. oral communication skills are enormously valuable
across a range of professions and yet are often undervalued in HE.
• This does not mean that writing skills are poised to become less
important as AI tools start to more prominent.
Balance essays with other types of assessment
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16. • Designing assignments where students can demonstrate their
understanding (independent of written work) not just recite knowledge.
• Pen-and-paper exams are back for some. Whilst others are shifting
away from exams to more ‘authentic’ assessments (assessments that
evaluate real-world skills that students will employ in the workplace).
• Few workplaces require their employees to write detailed discussions of
difficult questions by hand, and without a computer.
• Viva’s require students to understand and communicate the ideas
they’ve defended in their essay (regardless if they are outsourced).
• Assignments that ask for deep research on recent developments are,
are relatively AI-resistant. But you need to continuously reviewed this.
Develop AI-resistant assessments
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17. • Ask students to:
• Include their personal experience or perspectives in their writing.
• Analyse a class discussions.
• Untangle a complex instruction that involve long texts that do not
fit a typical ChatGPT prompt, or
• Write about a very recent events (in the last week or so) that may
not be found in the ChatGPT database yet.
• But test it first
Set personalised, complex or topical tasks
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18. • Provide them the readings that they must use.
• Source these readings from Google Scholar or from University
Databases (closed journals)
• Submit a word version or use a common drive with version
history enabled
• Ask them to reflect on what they learned from doing an activity
(3-500 words max)
For Essays
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19. • Present questions using images, figures, or charts as auxiliary
information, and a nonspecific question as stem.
• For example, ‘which section of the figure below demonstrates. . . ?’
• Present auxiliary visuals as hotspot questions where the student
must click on an area of the image to indicate the correct answer
• For example, ‘select the area on the image which shows . . .’
• Present questions using a series of images, or a video
accompanied with conditional logic branching questions.
• For example, ‘at this point in the interaction, which question should
you ask the customer?’
Multiple choice?
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20. • Present questions that require the student to apply a concept
or principle to an up-to-date scenario or case study.
• For example, ‘the VOICE legislation to hold a referendum went through
parliament a while back, but there were those that spoke against it.
What are the implication of the dissenting voices?’
• Present the answer
• Then get student to choose the appropriate question.
Cont…
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21. • ChatGPT is not good at providing appropriate sources and quotations.
• So, engage students in writing practices focused on correcting factual
errors and locating accurate data sources (compare and contrast activity)
• Ask students cite and reference the work of others accurately and
properly by using in-text citations or including bibliography.
• Ask them to critique a piece of writing generated by ChatGPT by
analysing and interpreting how it conveys an idea and assessing its
strengths and weaknesses in terms of readability, credibility,
comprehensiveness, accuracy and so on.
Take advantage of AI’s shortcomings
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22. David Boud’s Conception
of Assessment
“Assessment methods … have a
greater influence on what students
learn than any other single factor. This
influence may well be of greater
importance than the impact of
teaching materials”
Boud, D (1988) Developing Student Autonomy in Learning
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