I’ve been teaching at this university for 17 years and suddenly this comes along to devalue everything I’ve done to become a caring, competent instructor, and the students are creating make-work for me…I’m grading fake papers instead of playing with my own kids.
Beth McMurtrie (2024-06-13). Professors Ask: Are We Just Grading Robots?
Note: While I have sympathy for anyone who feels like their work is taking time away from their family, I don’t think that’s the point. Whether you’re grading fake papers or real ones, you shouldn’t be in a position where you have to choose between your family and work (Head space anyone?).
There’s a small (cynical) part of me that can’t help wondering if this is some kind of karmic retribution for all the inauthentic, invalid, and unreliable assessments (i.e. “make-work”) we’ve given students over the years. Finally, students now have the means to waste our time after all the years we’ve been wasting theirs.
This is being made starkly clear now that many of our traditional assessments are obsolete, while at the same time we insist on trying to hack them so that they’re ‘AI-resilient’.
But instead of looking at this as devaluing the work we do, I see that as an incredible opportunity to change our assessment paradigm. We can create a system where students use AI to not only support their learning, but also possibly make a real positive impact in the world. We have no shortage of problems in society that creative, engaged, and motivated young people can’t work on, using the knowledge they acquire in class, supported with genAI.
If we don’t want the busy-work of marking assessments that have been completed by AI, we should stop giving students the busy-work of assessments that can be completed by AI.
Assessment needs to move from trying to evaluate what information students have in their heads, to what they can do with that information in the world. AI doesn’t have to devalue the assessment tasks that students complete; it can supercharge them through authentic assessments that have an impact in the world.