Yesterday I wrote a short post about how AI detection isn’t the solution to cheating in a higher education context, and that cheating is a social problem, not a technological one.
I’m following that up with a link to a position paper explaining why assessment validity is a more important problem to focus on, than cheating.
Dawson, P., Bearman, M., Dollinger, M., & Boud, D. (2024). Validity matters more than cheating. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2024.2386662
We begin by questioning what cheating is, why it is wrong, and how justifiable the approaches used to address cheating are. We then propose a reframing of cheating as subsumed by assessment validity. In this view, cheating is addressed without moralising, as part of the broader positive mission of assurance of learning. This perspective highlights how attempts to improve validity by addressing cheating can sometimes make validity worse, for example when an anti-cheating technology reduces cheating but creates problems for inclusion. In shifting focus from cheating to validity, we hope to draw renewed attention to what matters most in assessment: that we know our graduates are capable of what we say they are.
I’ve said the same thing on this blog, in the context of tracking student attendance; we shouldn’t care that students attend class. We should only care that they can do what our assessments say they can do. And that requires assessment validity. If our assessments are reliable and valid, it would address many of our concerns in higher education.