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Marking in the age of AI - Part 1

On moral panics and Bloom’s taxonomy

Stephanie Decker FAcSS FBAM

May 23

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I am marking at the moment. And it is quite an interesting experience (for a change, you might say). Marking in the age of GenAI is very different from before. This is the first time I have assessed student work since spring 2023, because I had a senior leadership role in between. ChatGPT had not been out that long when I was last marking. It was creeping in, at least as an educator, you were getting suspicious. Two years on, this is different. There is no more plagiarism in students’ work that Turnitin is picking up on. The English is clear and comprehensible -- notably even in the case of students who can barely make themselves understood verbally. So yes, this is another post about AI (sorry, other stuff coming soon). But it is difficult to escape right now, and it does feel like we are living through a major Zeitenwende – when the tides of time are shifting, and the afterwards does not at all look like the before times anymore. It is a strange feeling to know that we are living through one of these moments that we will all look back on as a profound marker in time. But to be fair, we should be getting used to it. We’ve had a few since the millennium.

Moral panic ahead

But then, is it as big a moment as so many blogs, articles, and punters make out? In the last few weeks, the debate appears to have been dominated by the New York Intelligencer article, which, full disclosure, I have not read as I do not have a subscription. However, I feel like I have, given the amount of commentary I have seen on it on my feeds… It’s somewhat baffling how they only ever pick up on things in US Media YEARS after the rest of us in other English-speaking countries, then launch into a conversation that quickly dominates the (metaphorical) airwaves and goes through much handwringing about problems and solutions that just feel a little… 2023? Let’s recap – students cheat by submitting work created by generative AI tools, professors know but cannot do anything about it because there are no tools to identify AI use reliably, and it is the end of Higher Education AS WE KNOW IT. There seems to be a whole move to outright ban the use of AI, to go back to in-person handwritten exams… all of which is logistically impossible, questionable preparation for an increasingly difficult job market, and raises some serious pedagogical questions about what we actually test in exams...