Lucy Carroll reports in today’s Sun-Herald that the number of students caught cheating in the HSC has doubled in the past five years, a trend some in the sector have attributed to rising instances of teenagers using generative AI in their assessments.
With all we know about the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence and its increasing sophistication, the figure is likely to be an underestimate. Indeed, Australian Tutoring Association president Mohan Dhall told Carroll that malpractice as a result of AI was likely going “vastly undetected”.
Over the past two years, the university sector has grappled with how to manage the use of AI in assessments.
After initially reacting with outright bans, the institutions – increasingly reliant on online learning as a cost-saving teaching model – have changed their tune, allowing AI to be used in at least some assessments.
At present, the University of Sydney is phasing in a policy that allows students to use AI in some assessments – a radical reversal of its previous ban on the technology. In the coming semester, students will be able to use AI in all take-home assessments, and co-ordinators cannot ban its use.
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At the University of NSW, teachers set a level of acceptable AI use for each assessment. The university signed an Australian-first deal last year with ChatGPT to roll out a special version of the technology on campus.
The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) believes it is the responsibility of individual schools and school sectors to manage policies for the use of AI in their establishments. But, in the case of the high-pressure, statewide HSC, this approach surely cannot hold.
If scenes outside selective schools test centres when some computers malfunctioned last month are anything to go by, any sense of unfairness across the system will not be tolerated: too much rides on the marks received by students in the NSW school system, be it a place at a top-performing selective school, or admission into a dream university course.
As Carroll reports today, 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”.
Read the full article here
