Centre Director Professor Sian Bayne spoke to the BBC about the current state of play regarding students' use of AI in their assessed work.
In higher education "the most high-profile concern has been around misconduct and cheating in assessments by generating essays and coursework," she said. However, while acknowledging public concern around this issue, she also emphasised that numbers of students using generative AI with the intention of ‘cheating’ are likely very low. Cases of AI misconduct get a lot of media focus, but data from known cases indicates that only around 0.02% of Scotland’s student population intend to cheat.
Professor Bayne emphasised in this interview that a relationship of trust between students, lecturers and the university should always be the basis of conversations about AI and its uses in teaching and assessment.
A significant issue we are now seeing is that rising levels of student anxiety around being seen to cheat is troubling for universities as well as for students themselves. In addition, research is starting to show that the ‘cognitive offloading’ which takes place when students use generative AI to summarise complex documents is likely to be a problem for higher education, which by its nature requires students to develop highly advanced skills in the reading, analysis and synthesis of complex texts.
In this article, Professor Bayne emphasises the creative potential universities hold for diversifying assessment methods, adding that "at the moment we are thinking about ways which we can redesign assessment so that we're using more multi-modal methods like images, audio and video, plus oral assessments or more in-person exams, as other ways of protecting against misconduct".
Read the article on the BBC website: Are Scottish students using AI to cheat their way to a degree? - BBC News.