Redesign assessments to require critical thinking, originality, interactive activities, and real-time or proctored formats¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 1 claim (1 mixed) · 1 study (1 causal), q3 · 1 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description¶

The article recommends that university staff design assessments that are harder to complete with ChatGPT: tasks demanding critical thinking, problem-solving and communication, open-ended work encouraging originality and creativity, group discussions and presentations, and real-time or proctored exams. The article states such designs "can make it more difficult for students to use ChatGPT to complete their assignments" and promote critical thinking and independent learning.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Assessments must require students to generate original ideas, e.g. their own research questions or defended arguments, rather than essays on set topics

Constraints¶

• The article notes it is by no means certain who will win the arms race between detection and generation technology

Target Learners¶

• higher education students

Target Learning Goals¶

• critical thinking
• problem-solving
• communication skills
• academic integrity

Claims¶

• ChatGPT use improves the quality, elaboration, and originality of university students' solutions to a complex ill-defined problem-solving task [~W]

Related Strategies¶

• Prevent AI-assisted plagiarism through student education, signed declarations, draft submissions, clear guidelines, and close monitoring
• Increase the proportion of AI-resistant problem formats in learning-task design to preserve authentic engagement without proctoring
• Redesign assessment so fluency is not enough: process logs, staged drafts, in-class composition, and oral defences
• Redesign assessment reflectively for possible AI use, using supervised tasks for lower-order skills and intentional AI use with reflection for higher-order work
• Embed AI as a learning partner and redesign assessments for AI-rich contexts
• Detect machine-generated writing by checking citations, originality, factual errors, grammar, contextual awareness, and with language-analysis tools

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Debby R. E. Cotton, Peter A. Cotton & J. Reuben Shipway (2024) Chatting and cheating: Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 61:2, 228-239. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2023.2190148