In a CfLT-sponsored webinar on assessment and gen-AI on March 3, Leon Furze (longtime educator, education administrator, and now Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation on AI in writing instruction) shared an academic article, “Validity Matters More than Cheating,” which argues that academic integrity needs to focus on “assessment validity” rather than “cheating.” Cheating is a question of moral integrity, whereas validity is a process by which educators ensure that students have met learning outcomes. So the question shifts from “How can we stop students from cheating?” to “How can we validate, through various forms of assessment, that students have met learning goals?”
My main takeaway from Furze’s presentation is that we can no longer take a single type of assessment as evidence that students have met a learning goal. We need to instead consider how a range of activities provides evidence of student learning. We already do this to some degree by including participation grades, scaffolding and low-risk activities, as well as the high-stakes assignments. But our current model places most of the assessment burden on those high-stakes assessments (hence the name). Maybe it’s time to take the pressure off of those and look to the totality of student contributions to assess learning.
Stay tuned for the next TTT where I’ll share some thoughts about how to do that. If you have any thoughts, please send them my way (martinr@denison.edu).