Article by Kris Vespia, Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL)
CATL’s programming focus for the Fall 2025 semester is “Assessment in the Digital Age.” Lately, we hear a lot of concerns from instructors regarding generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and academic honesty, whether it’s “I just know all my students are cheating now,” or “online surveillance tools (or in-person exams) are my only option when testing at this point” or even, “it feels like there’s no support when I bring up AI misuse, so why should I even try to pursue misconduct?” Those quotes paint a grim picture, likely an overly grim one. They also overlook the fact that Google and a host of “study” sites have been used for years to look up exam answers. Nonetheless, the frustrations of instructors and the fear of students who believe they may be unjustly accused of cheating are very real and very painful. These attitudes, however, risk creating an environment where mistrust overshadows collaboration, which can be counterproductive to learning and to work satisfaction for both groups. Although CATL does not have any quick and easy answers for you, we are going to engage with you on issues surrounding assessment today.
How are we going to have these conversations? We will offer three workshops this semester that we hope will be of help: a) aligning assessment and learning outcomes, b) considering assessment alternatives in your discipline, and c) addressing the issue of academic integrity. Outlook invitations for these three sessions have already been sent by the Provost’s Office, and we look forward to your participation. In addition to these workshops, we will sponsor or co-facilitate book groups on The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI. As always, we will offer consultations to individuals or groups who request them, create and/or provide new assessment resources, and craft Teach Tuesday pieces and/or blogs to expose you to current readings and thinking on these topics.
To begin our discussions about assessment in the digital age, we invite you to consider some suggestions from an August 11 article in The Teaching Professor. This piece encourages instructors to enter an assignment prompt into a GAI tool (e.g., Copilot, ChatGPT) to determine whether GAI can easily complete it. If so, the author suggests making adjustments. Here are three general strategies adapted from Dutt (2025):
- Try to make students display their thinking. That is, ask them to annotate computer code or steps in a math problem. Why did they choose a certain approach at each point, and what alternatives did they consider? In the essay linked above, Dutt suggests implementing “‘thinking memos’ where students explain how they approached the prompt, what challenges they faced, and how their ideas evolved.”
- Allow students to use GAI, but require them to talk about it. Ask students to tell you when and how they used GAI. You could ask for a simple statement or ask for a reflective paragraph on the experience that must also include an explanation of how they decided what to use and what not to.
- If students are completing a large project, break it into scaffolded stages that provide ongoing feedback, which could even be peer review. Could a large project have an initial proposal or an outline, a draft, peer reviews, and then the final submission? Those stages may be harder to complete with GAI, and the feedback provided along the way may lead to a higher quality and easier-to-grade final project.
None of the ideas above are panaceas, but they are some practical strategies that can assist you and your students in understanding their approach to learning.
Dutt, R. (2025, August 11). Redesigning assignments for an AI-influenced classroom. The Teaching Professor.