06 July 2023

Make assessments AI-proof, and fast

People who don't work in academia often think that when the teaching is over, work pretty much stops. Unfortunately, that's not the case! First there is the marking, and then you get all the preparations for the next year. And this year, that is a bit more work than normal. Some seven months after ChatGPT was launched, we now have to make sure all our assessments are AI-proof. And we need to file the details of all our modules, including assessments, by mid July. So there is a bit of time pressure!

Our director of teaching and learning had organised some discussion sessions so that staff who weren't quite sure how to go about it could bounce ideas off other people. I was a little bit worried because a colleague I share two modules with was off sick. I wanted to make changes, but I also wanted to run them past him! Fortunately, he wasn't too ill to read emails.

In the end, for me things weren't all too bad. I have some MCQ tests that I don't think AI will be very good at, I have some assignments where students have to work up data, and ChatGPT can't do that yet, and the students have to do presentations. There were two assignments I was worried about. One was an exam, and I wanted to try how well AI would do answering them, and the other one involved writing a popular-scientific article. I figured the latter would really be something AI could do. I tried to pull both the exam and the article through AI, and when I managed I had to conclude that AI is quite good at answering the questions that do not depend on graphs and sketches. It even did calculations! Without me telling it how. 

As I write this, the final decisions have not yet been made. But we’re working on it. It does make for another busy week, though! 



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