A recent editorial for the Sun-Herald, syndicated in The Age, focused on the threat of artificial intelligence to academic integrity for take home assessments. The main through line of the article was this: whilst universities have been given the freedom to implement institutional rules regarding AI use, the K-12 sector needs a systemic approach which should be determined by New South Wales governing body, NESA.
The (paywalled) editorial had the following quote about Catholic Schools NSW’s stance stating:
a paper published last month by Catholic Schools NSW said HSC take-home assessments should decrease in importance for a student’s overall grade until “the AI threat to assessment integrity can be satisfactorily contained”.
Artificial intelligence certainly presents problems for take-home assessments, but as the editorial also says, “One might cynically suggest that programs such as ChatGPT have merely democratised the essay ghost-writing already taking place at coaching colleges across Sydney.”
I think we’re focusing on the wrong issues.
The Real Problem
The real problem is not the threat of AI to academic integrity for take home assessments, it’s the take home assessments themselves. Comparing K-12 to the higher education sector is flawed on many levels, but I want to focus on one particular area in this article: a student’s time.
A student in first year of university is likely to be studying one or two major disciplines and several supplementary courses. Depending on the course face-to-face hours, whether in person or virtual, might range from 5 to 25 hours per week. Some courses, like medicine and dentistry, may be significantly higher. Any remaining time is left to the discretion of the student.
In K-12, students regularly study five or six subjects, and they are generally required to be at school from around 8:30am to 3:30pm. That’s 7 hours a day, or 35 hours a week, not counting travel time or before and after school commitments. It’s also not uncommon to see schools with homework policies that states students in Year 11 or 12 should be completing up to four hours of homework a night in preparation for examinations in the HSC and VCE.
This is the problem.
Where is a student’s “right to disconnect”?
In recent years in Australia, the Right to Disconnect has been a hot topic for businesses. The Right to Disconnect states that employees:
have the right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact (or attempted contact) outside their working hours, unless doing so is unreasonable.
Students in university have a tacit right to disconnect, since nobody is monitoring what they do with their spare time. In some cases, universities have conditions limiting the amount of part-time work a student can commit to. Otherwise, university students are treated like adults and are free to do what they like with their time.
But where is the secondary student’s right to disconnect? With five or six senior subjects vying for attention, examinations looming at the end of the year, pressure from schools, parents and the media, and an expectation of two to four hours per night above and beyond their regular school hours, students are expected to be always on.
Most take-home assessments likely involve some kind of technology: they will be conducted via shared documents, uploaded into or completed on Learning Management Systems, and the assessment and reporting of them will be conducted on the same digital platforms. Every time we issue a take-home task we force more technology use, and we push students further into the environment of AI, social media, and the kinds of addictive technologies we’re apparently so concerned about weaning them off.
But where else beyond school are students expected to multitask across half a dozen disciplines? Where else are they expected to sit in exam halls for two weeks straight, being tested across those various subject areas, to attain a score that increasingly isn’t even valued by the universities they’re supposedly intended for?
The Solution
Perhaps the solution, then, is not to look at use or misuse of technology, or whether all assessments should be conducted at school under invigilated conditions.
Perhaps the solution is to revisit our expectations on the purpose of senior secondary school and to ask some serious questions about the way we do things, such as:
- Why are students required to spread themselves across so many disciplines?
- Why do these disciplines contribute (in Australia) to a rank?
- Why can’t the curriculum within individual subjects be made deeper and less broad?
- Why can’t the amount of individual class time per subject area be increased?
- Why can’t homework and take home assessments be removed from the equation entirely?
- Why can’t students work at school for seven hours a day and not have that time leach out into their lives beyond school?
There are valid arguments, both for and against all of these questions.
And there is little consistency from state to state so it’s hard to have sensible conversations at a national level. Here’s a comparison of a few factors across four Australian states and the UK A-Level:
| Feature | ACT | NSW (HSC) | Victoria (VCE) | Queensland (QCE) | UK A-level |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subject curriculum | College-designed within BSSS frameworks | Standardised state syllabuses | Standardised state study designs | QCAA syllabuses | National exam-board syllabuses |
| External exams | None (subject); AST for scaling only | Yes – 50 % of mark | Yes – ≥ 50 % (60 % Maths) | Yes – 25 % or 50 % | Yes – 80-100 % |
| Internal assessment share | 100 % per subject | 50 % | 40-50 % | 50-75 % | 0-20 % |
| Breadth vs depth | Typically 5-6 courses, semester units | 5-6 subjects over two years | 5-6 subjects over two years | 5-6 subjects over two years | Usually 3 subjects, two-year linear |
| Common scaling test | AST | None (exam results scale) | GAT for moderation only | None (statistical scaling) | Not applicable |
In a recent blog post, technology critic Audrey Watters wrote about social commentary that artificial intelligence has ruined the education system. In her article, she pointed out that the education system never worked for some students. The take-home assessment in particular has never worked for some communities. Students with access to money or professional tutors have always been able to outperform in take home assessments. Students with disrupted home lives, students in care, students with carers’ responsibilities and so on have always been disadvantaged by take home assessments. These same students are disadvantaged more broadly by the senior secondary system.
We know that these things are true, and we know that artificial intelligence did not cause these problems.
So what are we going to do about it?
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