Student Assessment in a World of Gen AI: Balancing Ethics and Intellectual Engagement with Blogs

• In Event: Roundtable Session 11
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: The challenges and impacts of assessment

Proposal

The CIES theme “Envisioning Education in a Digital Society” examines technological advancements that “bring complex challenges, including the adoption of technology in educational settings, [and] ethical concerns… that technologies can create” (CIES, 2024). Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) was developed in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 2022 that OpenAI released ChatGPT, a generative text application that increased accessibility of Gen AI to the general population by partnering a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) with a chat-based interface (Lawton, 2024). The application attracted “over 100 million users within 2 months, representing the fastest ever consumer adoption of a service” (Lawton, para. 7, 2024). Suddenly, the ability to generate text was available at the click of a button, putting this technology in the hands of anyone who needed to create written content, and creating ethical concerns in all levels of higher education, from faculty research to student assignments.

With the advent of Gen AI and applications like ChatGPT, universities have grown increasingly concerned with the impact on academic integrity, especially in relation to cheating, plagiarism, and the potential decrease in intellectualism. In their piece “Emerging Research and Policy Themes on Academic Integrity in the Age of ChatGPT and Generative AI”, Plata, De Guzman and Quesada (2023) reviewed 37 articles in a meta-study on the effects of Gen AI on academic integrity, and explored the strategies employed by 20 global universities to mitigate the impact of students’ use of AI tools on intellectual integrity and learning. Of the three themes identified by the research, the “encouragement of using Gen AI tools in the academe and the workplace, for productivity” is the approach that both accepts Gen AI and promotes responsible use in an academic setting (Plata, et. al., p. 1, 2023).

One recommendation of the Plata, et. al. study was to use Gen AI to improve classroom practices (2023). This proposal was explored in a faculty retreat at the University of Illinois, where faculty were encouraged to “ensure that the opportunities provided by access to digital tools are utilized effectively and ethically…” (CITL, 2024). The goal of the retreat was to provide the skills and tools for faculty to develop innovative strategies and create transformative classroom experiences that improve students’ experience. Guided by the literature and workshops, this roundtable discussion aims to explore new pedagogical approaches in response to technological change.

Through the restructuring of a current graduate-level class, data was collected to examine the impact of new pedagogy on student comprehension and engagement. One assignment formerly required a summative and critical reflection of the readings – a task potentially undertaken with Gen AI. To increase students’ creative engagement, the assignment was transformed from an essay to a blog post, which invited students to examine intersections between the material and their academic and professional experiences. The students were then surveyed to measure the impact on learning and engagement. This roundtable talk presents the outcome of this analysis to explore the CIES question of “How can we envision teaching… in a digital society?” (CIES, 2024).

Author

• Donna C Tonini, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign