If the words AI and assessment are in the same sentence, the knee-jerk reaction is panic, as fears of technophobia, over-standardization, miscalculation, bias, security, and mistrust are mixed together in the minds of many students and educators.
As generative AI continues to revolutionize teaching and learning, it’s important for both educators and students to understand how this technology impacts assessment practices.
First of all, we need to recognize that AI is not a fad, but a major step in the progress of educational technology. It’s here for good, so students should be prepared and assessed for a world in which they will use AI every day. At the same time, teachers should be embracing AI’s capacity to relieve the grind, especially when it comes to assessment. Traditionally, assessing students’ language proficiency levels has been a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. The advent of AI language assessments has revolutionized this practice by using machine learning technology, trained on extensive datasets, to emulate human judgment. Automated essay evaluation software has been gradually improving over decades, and now powered with today’s AI tools, it is changing our approach to student evaluations.
The flexibility offered by AI language assessments should be harnessed to provide tailored assessments for multilingual learners, leaving no place for standardized testing, which was so often deficit focused. In the same way that students have been trusted to use calculators in exams for decades, we will have to trust students to use AI responsibly—and that will mean encouraging community and fostering transparency so that students learn to use AI tools to hone their personal expertise, rather than as a substitute for it.
Whether the AI tools are being used by educators and administrators to assess students or by students to help them perform better in assessments, the net result will hopefully be more time for both educators and students to focus on personal growth goals, more reflective learning, and identification of gaps in knowledge or areas that could do with improvement.
AI offers even more potential than traditional educational technology for differentiated learning and assessment, plus the relief of some burdensome tasks for educators and administrators, but it will only be truly a step forward when it is adopted within the context of a whole-school approach in which students, educators, and administrators learn and collaborate to best implement the technology, while always focusing on its effect on the most disadvantaged students, who may be the least able to benefit from its advantages.
Daniel Ward, Editor
