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27 April 2023

By Mary Richardson

Since its launch in November 2022, the Open AI chatbot, ChatGPT, has been flexing its artificial intelligence and causing moral and practical panics on university campuses across the world. It is unsurprising that universities are concerned about the ramifications of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to create responses to assessments because this:

1. Challenges reliable identification of academic standards; and
2. Initiates detailed reviews of certain types of assessment and their future applicability.

The ability of a faceless, brainless machine to answer questions, write poetry, compose songs (although musician, Nick Cave disagrees) and create visual art, all in a matter of seconds, presents us with some astonishing food for thought. The future of not just how we write, but what we might wish to say, is looking potentially very different as more free LLMs become available and ‘learn’ how to write for us. As someone who researches educational assessment, and who teaches and assesses students, there are many questions that I’m grappling with in relation to this new landscape in education, but here I’m focusing on some that academics might wish to consider with their students:

1. Does the creation and release of LLMs mean students will be more tempted to let an AI model do their academic work for them?
2. What characterizes cheating when using LLMs in assessment?

(more…)

Mary Richardson, UCL, first published on The Conversation

After five days of uncertainty and anxiety, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announced on August 17 that students in England would be awarded their centre assessment grades (CAGs) this summer – that is, the grade their school or college expected they would most likely have attained had they taken their exams – or their moderated grade, whichever was higher.

The announcement follows widespread outrage after it emerged that the poorest students were hardest hit by the inadequacies of the algorithm used to moderate their grades.

Collective sighs of relief were palpable as teachers no longer faced the stress of an appeals process while also preparing to start one of the most complex and challenging years of their careers. Students, however, (more…)

Tina Isaacs and Lena Gray. 
As we wind down from a relatively calm examination season – even with the introduction of new examinations this year – some of us continue to mull over the idea of ‘standards’ in examination systems.
What does the term ‘standards’ mean, anyway? It crops up everywhere in the world of assessment. In England, exam boards and Ofqual, which offer general qualifications like GCSEs and A levels, have to try to make sure that grades have the same meaning across subjects, in different years, and even between competing exam boards – a Sisyphean task that is fraught with technical challenges. This is an area in which assessment researchers like us can see our work having real impact, and there are plenty of exciting developments to shape new thinking. One of those developments is the publication on 10 September by the UCL IOE press of a new book called Exam standards: how measures and meanings differ around the world.
Standard setting in national exams is a topic of interest throughout the global assessment community, yet opportunities for information sharing are rare, given the politically sensitive (more…)