What to Do About Assessment?
Along with the promise of LLM-based tools to help instructors with planning and materials creation, and to help students with explanations and writing tips comes the spectre of students’ overreliance on these tools to “do their homework.” For decades, educators have relied on certain types of assessments to accurately gauge student knowledge in various domains; such assessments can vary by age or level, by region, by discipline, by topic, by goal, etc., but they are more or less tried and true, and evolution of assessments tends to be gradual. When ChatGPT burst onto the scene near the end of the Fall term 2022, the upheaval was immediate. Astute instructors knew that there wasn’t much to be done in the remaining weeks of the term, but that they would have to implement changes to their Winter 2023 assessments. For many, this hearkened back to 2020, when, at approximately the same point in the semester, the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world, and education pivoted to online learning. Instructors were faced with the question of what on earth to do in the waning weeks of the semester, and, equally importantly, what could be done for the following term. In Spring 2020, the hopes were that any disruption to education due to the pandemic would be temporary, and that we would all “get back to normal” soon. This ended up taking longer than most people anticipated, and there were changes to education (and work life) that persist and may become permanent (e.g., more flexible work arrangements, more work from home, more distance learning, more video-conferencing instead of travel for work, etc.). While the suddenness of this disruptive technology is likely similar to the shock of the pandemic and pivot online, we will never “go back” to a time without GenAI, and assessments need to change to match this new reality. In the next section, we’ll discuss some broader changes to teaching and learning over a longer timeframe, but in this chapter, we’ll look at some ways to use—and avoid—ChatGPT in STEM assessments.
