- Video Insight
Rethinking Assessment: When Using AI Is the Rule, Not the Exception
- 2 mins
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Daniel Hulme (WPP), Kerri Buttery (VETNexus), Toby George Jones (Knowello)
There’s a really good use case. A professor called Ethan Mullik and I strongly recommend anyone that’s starting their journey with looking at AI and education should look him up. It’s very approachable to the content he creates on LinkedIn. He also wrote a great book called co- intelligence and he talks about this idea of actually sort of flipping the scenario of worrying about AI being used in assessment and he actually deliberately designs at least one one assessment per module or semester however it is he’s he’s structuring it where actually students have to use AI and so they ha they they would fail the assessment if they did not use AI in getting the answers to the assessment and the reason for doing this is that on them going out and exploring and using whatever LLM of their chatbot of their choosing to get their answers. The assessment then becomes about them coming into class and then actually reviewing the answers and actually critiquing whether they think that the chat GPT Gemini whatever they used did a good job of answering it. So the students are still having to understand the content.
They’re still having to have a level of expertise to be able to or proficiency rather than being able to carry out that assessment, but they’re being encouraged to use it to use the tool. And so I believe it’s something that it’s not something I’ve heard people doing about over here. I think it’d be very difficult in certain assessment scenarios. Maybe you could do it in formative assessment or do it as a bit of an additional quizzing perhaps as a class activity. But I think it’s a really interesting way of actually embracing AI and also starting to learn about the limitations as a result of it as I think one of the biggest issues with people not experimenting is actually not understanding where is AI actually currently or genai currently not very good and what sort of questions is it actually struggling with and we only get that through actually trying it.
Key Points
- Flip the AI fear: Instead of worrying about students using AI to cheat, design an assessment where using AI is mandatory — students fail if they don't use it.
- Professor Ethan Mollick as a model: The Wharton professor and author of Co-Intelligence designs at least one such assessment per module or semester; his LinkedIn content and book are recommended starting points.
- Critical evaluation over rote answers: The real learning happens in class, where students review and critique the AI-generated answers — assessing whether ChatGPT or Gemini actually did a good job.
- Expertise and proficiency still matter: Students still need subject-matter knowledge to evaluate AI outputs meaningfully, so the approach doesn't eliminate rigour.
- Building digital literacy: Encouraging students to experiment with AI tools helps them understand the genuine limitations and weak spots of current generative AI.
- Experimentation is key: The only way to understand where AI is currently weak is to actually try it — not experimenting means staying ignorant of its limitations.