The Master and the Student.

 

Image generated using DALL-E 3
via Bing Image Creator

I've been involved with (or I've been sitting in on) a lot of meetings at the moment about the future of assessment in a post AI world.

How can you ensure the students are actually learning when they can use AI to complete any part of any assessment for which they have advanced warning? If your goal is to test their own, actual knowledge, the options available are limited. They grow even more limited if you don't want every assessment item to be some kind of invigilated exam.

So what can we do to make sure the graduates of our universities actually meet the graduate attributes? In a world where it's almost impossible to survive without hustling, how can we ensure the student who has graduated from your university actually learned anything, apart from how to hustle their degree?

To be honest, I'm not sure you can. The more I hear and read about this conundrum, the more I think about the implications of this Brave New World in which we find ourselves, the more I think our current education system can't continue to work like this.

What's the solution? 

Well, some clever bunny somewhere is going to come up with a better option for assessing large numbers of students with small numbers of teachers and markers, but I think the only "true" solution that will let us ensure the graduates actually know their stuff is to go back to the old "Masters' Apprentices" way of doing things. Small numbers of students attached to teacher who is able to regularly talk to them and watch them work, and glean from those conversations and observations if they know what they are doing.

This is going to fly in the face of budget conscious higher education institutions who want to have hundreds of "bums on seats" while only having scant handfuls of academic faculty members on the payroll.

But I honestly think this is the way we need to go to ensure we aren't completely deskilling ourselves and undermining our future. The Capitalist way of delivering education has just "Capitalist-ed" itself into a corner, and it was barely fit for purpose before it became possible to outsource your every thought and sentence to a machine.

How can you ensure your students actually know their stuff before they go out into the real world? By talking to them. Really, deeply, meaningfully talking to them. Have a real conversation with them about what they know and how they would apply that knowledge. Give them puzzles to solve and be with them, as they solve them – watching how they go about it, asking them about their processes.

This is, I feel, the best way to know if you are happy to release that student out in the world to be a professional in your field.