Assessment Design


Let’s consider to what extent we would like students to use AI in their assessments. The AI Assessment Scale (AIAS) (Perkins et al., 2024) is a useful scale to help you decide. Find out more about it here.


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See other variations of this scale here. Click the button below for help with using this scale when designing your assessments.

You can also consider the University of Sydney’s ‘two-lane approach’:

The two-lane approach below emphasises balance between assurance, and human-AI collaboration. The reality in any one unit will likely be a situation where some assessments lie in lane 1 in order to assure attainment of all learning outcomes, but most other assessments lie in lane 2. Fundamentally, we want to develop students who are well-rounded and can contribute and lead effectively in authentic, contemporary environments (which will include AI), and also be assured of their learning. Therefore in this context, it is important to privilege lane 2 assessments with a higher weighting than lane 1 assessments.

Lane 1 – Examples of assured ‘assessment of learning’

  • In-class contemporaneous assessment e.g. skills-based assessments run during tutorials or workshops
  • Viva voces or other interactive oral assessments
  • Live simulation-based assessments
  • Supervised on-campus exams and tests, used sparingly, designed to be authentic, and for assuring program rather than unit-level outcomes

Lane 2 – Examples of human-AI collaboration in ‘assessment as learning’

  • Students use AI to suggest ideas, summarise resources, and generate outlines/structures for assessments. They provide the AI completions as an appendix to their submission.
  • Students use AI-generated responses as part of their research and discovery process. They critically analyse the AI response against their other research. The AI completion and critique provided as part of the submission.
  • Students initiate the process of writing and use AI to help them iterate ideas, expression, opinions, analysis, etc. They document the process and reasoning behind their human-AI collaboration. The documented process demonstrates how the collaborative writing process has helped students think, find their voice, and learn. The documented process is graded and more heavily weighted than the artefact.
  • Students design prompts to have AI draft an authentic artefact (e.g. policy briefing, draft advice, pitch deck, marketing copy, impact analysis, etc) and improve upon it. They document the process and reasoning: initial prompt, improvements, sources, critiques. The documented process demonstrates learning, is graded, and is more heavily weighted than the artefact. More information.

They advise integrating higher-order thinking, real-world data sets, creative artefacts, oral assessments and multi-stage assignments to develop AI-resistant evaluations, embracing AI as a learning tool while upholding academic integrity through updated pedagogical models. Check out their full guide for examples of uses, wording and rubric criteria.

You can find even more examples of uses in the appendices of Cornell University’s Committee Report: Generative Artificial Intelligence for Education and Pedagogy.


NTU Examples

What is GenAI

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Other Curated Examples