The real reason for assessment
By Darren Coxon· Building inContact· 2 min read
By using AI to assess, we entirely miss the point of what assessment is actually for.
This article articulates it precisely.
“Assessment is not just a system for distributing marks. It is part of how educational meaning is made, so students feel seen, standards are upheld and trust is maintained. Use of AI in assessment poses a risk to these values.”
Of course, from an institutional point of view accurate assessment is critical. AI clearly cannot do this well yet. It will likely be able to in time, but currently it lacks accuracy and rewards verbosity over concision. No surprises there.
But the more important point is that students need trusted experts whose opinions they respect to take the time to read their writing and give them feedback.
As the article said, they need to be seen.
As one sharp sixth former said to me last year. “If AI sets the work and AI marks the work, why should I bother to do the bit in the middle?”
His point was not over the importance of learning and demonstrating that learning. It was more one of commensurate effort.
Students expect teachers to do their job. To fulfil their side of the contract. And one part of that contract is reading student work and assessing it.
Fail in that and you’ve lost the battle.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for ways we can use AI for the admin side of things. And used well it can be a great tool in the hands of students to act as a guide, support and feedback tool.
But it’s probably worth reminding ourselves that teaching is profoundly relational. And if we put AI between us and those we teach we risk damaging that relationship.
As honestly? Marking is just part of the job. 🤷♂️
7 responses
Sethi De Clercq
I wholeheartedly agree with this. AI can be used to spot trends in large data sets and spot patterns you may otherwise miss, but the Assessment itself should be fully teacher led. The teacher know the student best. I like how 'No More Marking' Does it in which AI is used to analyse a piece of writing and give the teacher a summary overview of suggested next steps or teaching based on gap analysis but It does not blindly assign a mark. Also every school part of and using No More Marking assesses anonymised work with a simply which is better interface. This distributed assessments of writing across thousands or schools and educators makes for a real human driven assessment. But as always it will be interesting to see how it continues to evolve now they call it AI-enhanced Comparative Assessment and I do like that ring. As is should enhance our assessment not replace.
Chris Riesbeck
The educational system that I grew up with generated the training materials for that view of what matters with assignments that asked for 3 pages on why flowers matter by Wednesday.
Tim Smale
That`s it, the relationship factor of teaching is so important and I can see overuse of any resource, AI very much included, as something that erodes those relationships. I think education appreciates that there is a need for change, workload, stress, wellbeing and so on. So, as a result, we can cling on to something that is being sold as a life boat. But I have always argued that the success of any strategy in the classroom comes down to the relationship you have with the students. There is space for most pedagogical methods, but when we make it the only method, or an identikit for teaching, we lose sight of what makes education and learning so wonderful.
Curtis Wilson
When we introduced our Learning Gaps tool in Big Maths Online, I was told that I was insulting the profession. I genuinely offended a number of 'senior' educators who shared a view that teachers identify gaps in learning, systems can't do that and you will look stupid if you try to launch this... Just three years later, numerous systems had launched their own versions. The leap from a relatively simple, transparent Learning Gaps analysis tool (which retains the teacher's agency and supports their decision making), to the 'functions' that people are promoting AI to is concerning for me.
As your sixth former observed, I would extend the thread... What happens to quality of teaching, management and the fabric of a school? As seen in schools where a scheme robs the teachers of their agency and locus of control, motivation, morale and standards all fall... how can anything else be expected? When teachers are told to ignore their principles and morals to simply teach the scheme based on age and date, that is insulting. This new direction of AI in schools takes it another furlong further.
Darren Coxon
That's a good extension. I find it myself - if I let AI do the grunt work then it's harder to me to own the end result. So tbh now all I let it do is write my code and build my presentations. I need to keep the thinking part. As we all build trust over time and it's so easy to break that. Just look at the Nike ad using AI recently. A real trust breaker.
Curtis Wilson
@Darren Coxon I think the key to the way I'm working now is far more cat and mouse. Because I am developing solutions that will not include AI at all (so there will be no radical increase in price or reduction of performance when they start screwing us) in the release. I want to provide offline capability, anything I can do to make it as simple and risk free for parents to consider. AI does not like being told it will not be used and keeps trying to introduce dependencies, it's very unsettling at times.
Darren Coxon
@Tim Smale
I guess what it comes down to is what we invest our time in as educators and what the net result is. I also wonder how we ever get to know our students if we don't read the output of their learning.