Feel like you’re grading the work of robots? Want to give writing assignments where students actually do the writing? Worried your STEM students have outsourced their homework to AI assistants?
While no assessment is “AI proof,” some are more AI resilient than others, and we explored how to design these in our recent webinar, “AI Enabled and Resistant Online Classroom: A practical guide.” Throughout our discussion, we focus on strategies that are aligned with good learning practices and that also maintain a culture of trust in classrooms.
You’ll notice a pattern in many of our suggestions. AI resilient assignments typically do some combination of the following:
- Incorporate non-text elements, such as audio, video, or images.
- Invite students to interact with each other.
- Ask students to document processes and provide reflections in addition to submitting end products.
You can read about the strategies below, watch the webinar replay or if you’re a learn-by-doing type of person, you can also jump straight into the AI chatbot we’ve built around these strategies to:
Use this AI chatbot to revamp your own activity!
(free ChatGPT account required)
Strategy 1: Center (and document) the Writing Process
One strategy is to break writing into stages and ask students to document their process. Having students submit process work accomplishes a lot of good in the classroom. When students annotate texts, brainstorm or mindmap, outline, draft in stages, peer review, and revise, they:
- Are less likely to procrastinate to the last minute, panic, and turn to AI.
- Generate through these activities a set of documents, which you can review carefully if you’re uncertain of their creation process.
- Learn a writing process that will be useful to them in the future.
Here are some specific writing process artifacts you might ask students to submit:
- Brainstorming images. Ask students for digital or hand-drawn mind maps, which are trickier for AI to generate than straight text.
- Thesis statements, outlines, introduction and conclusion drafts, full drafts, revisions. While these documents are easier for AI to generate, breaking the process into small, discrete steps will make it more manageable for students to do without AI assistance.
- Multi-modal reflections. Ask students to submit video or audio reflections. In these reflections, they can explain their thought process, identify what they’re proud of or concerned about, ask questions, and explain where they hope to take their ideas next.
- Peer review. Ask students to complete peer review. Students could meet via Zoom for authenticity. Or consider having them submit “Dear Reader” videos (or audio) with their essays where they explain what questions they have and what they feel good or concerned about. Ask reviewers to submit audio or video comments in addition to (or in lieu of) written comments.
- Revisions with explanations. Require your students to revise. Then, with their final draft, invite them to submit a screenrecording where they walk through their paper, explaining the revisions they made along the way.
For Harmonize users:
Strategy 2: Invite Multi-modal Assignment Submissions
Ask students to complete video essays, design and screenrecord slideshows, record Tedx-style talks, pair up to do a podcast, create Tik Tok videos, and more. Inviting students to demonstrate their learning outside of (just) writing has numerous benefits:
- Supports Universal Design for Learning, because students can choose the modality that best suits their needs.
- Gives students additional real-life skills like formatting, designing, and presenting.
- Discourages use of Language Learning Models, which are less useful for these kinds of assessments.
- Makes your class a little more fun and interesting for both you and students.
For Harmonize users:
Strategy 3: Discuss within Documents
Instead of having students write free-standing summaries and analysis, why not have them leave annotations and comments right inside the documents you’re reading and discussing? Specialized annotation tools–such as Harmonize, Hypothes.is, and Perusall–might be available at your school. If not, you can get basic annotation functionality with Google docs or Microsoft 365. Having your students make comments, write analysis, and ask questions right in the text can:
- Create a sense of community around the acts of reading and brainstorming.
- Encourage students to complete reading that might otherwise be missed.
- Create some AI resilience, since it’s more difficult for AI to leave annotations.
Here are some tips for making annotation assignments more AI resilient:
- Choose readings that are “off the beaten track.” The less something has been written about on the internet, the less AI will have to say about it.
- Choose readings that include images and ask students to analyze both words and images. AI isn’t quite as good at parsing visual elements.
- Invite students to make connections between the text and their personal life or between the text and prior class discussions. AI has trouble making these connections. Bonus: they’re more fun and engaging for students.
For Harmonize users:
Strategy 4: Assign a Reflection or Process Journal
Have students submit regular updates on their writing or project progress. Check-ins help students stay on track and help you notice if anything goes wrong as the process unfolds. In addition to straightforward written updates, you can ask students to submit:
- Visual artifacts, such as hand-written notes or research database screenshots.
- Video or audio reflections about how they’re feeling or where they want to go next.
- Screenrecordings where they discuss changes or additions or show their research process.
- Reflections on reflections. Get meta! Ask students to return to previous weeks to comment on how their thinking has evolved or how their project has developed.
For Harmonize users:
Strategy 5: Design Group Projects
Ask students to create or accomplish something together, documenting their process along the way. Students could record their Zoom and Google meet sessions and/or submit AI summaries of their meetings. They could document their task management, submit a collaborative work document, write a group reflection, or do cross-group peer review. You can also leverage formalized peer review to encourage this interaction with many guardrails.
Working on a group project:
- Helps students learn valuable workplace skills. Working collaboratively is crucial to many jobs.
- Gives students peer support, because they can ask each other questions.
- Discourages AI use, because students have to be present to interact with their peers. Even if groups work asynchronously, they may be less likely to use AI knowing it could jeopardize their peers’ grades too.
- Lightens your grading load. While video assignments can take more time to grade, group projects generally take less time, since fewer total products are submitted.
Pro Tip: Worried that some students won’t pull their weight or that you’ll spend all your time mediating group conflicts? Invite students to regularly submit evaluations of their peers’ contributions to the project, and let them know in advance that you will take these into consideration for final grades.
For Harmonize users:
- Facilitate effective group work by setting up spaces for Small Group Discussions.
- Invite students to connect with each other in real-time using Harmonize Chat.
- Harmonize doesn’t allow group submissions, but try this: set a milestone for a comment rather than a post. Request that one student from each group submit the assignment as a post. Then, ask all group members to comment on that post explaining what they contributed to the project
- For formal peer review, use Harmonize’s Peer Review feature to handle the student assignment and review process.
Strategy 6: Promote Responsible AI Use
Students may be less likely to use AI inappropriately if you show them the right way to use it and/or give specific outlets for its use. Is there a component of the assignment (such as brainstorming, finding sources, or proofreading) where you could invite students to use AI? Could students complete an assignment two ways, with and without AI, and reflect on the differences? Students may need to use AI in the future, and you can help them learn how. Here are some ways to incorporate AI into assignments:
- Clarify what parts of the assignment can include AI use. You could even use an AI use indicator, such as the AI-Use-O-Meter.
- Ask students to submit records of AI use, such as the full text of an AI conversation or a screen recording where they interact with the AI and document their thought process.
- Teach students how to cite AI generated content. Students may not know how or why to cite their use of AI.
- Model good AI use by screen recording a sample ChatGPT session in which you prompt the AI and then change your prompts for better results.
For Harmonize users:
- Invite students to use AI responsibly with AI Student Coaching. The AI will provide rough scores (e.g., “some room for improvement”) on any coachable rubric items, but it won’t make changes for them. Learn more by watching AI Coaching: Equity and Time Savings.
- Help students log their AI use with our built-in screen recording tool.
- Add AI use indicators such as the AI-Use-O-Meter to your discussions. With Harmonize, you can easily choose image size, add alt text (so every student will know the correct usage level), and move the image above or below your assignment instructions.
Strategy 7: Show Work, Talk Process (STEM Classes)
Most discussions about AI resilient assessments focus on writing instruction, but STEM classes can also encounter problems with AI use. It’s increasingly possible for LLMs to complete math problems and write code. So what does AI resiliency look like in STEM classes? Try asking students to:
- Provide reflections in addition to answers. Ask students to record short audio or video clips in which they restate the problem, discuss their strategy choice, ask a question, or talk through their thought process. The process of reflection promotes deeper learning (and is harder to do with AI).
- Submit pictures showing their work. Many students find it easier to show work on paper and snap pictures. Just give them clear instructions for submission.
- Annotate problems or solutions. If you have an image or PDF annotation tool available, you might ask students to leave line comments and annotations on a problem and/or solution. They could comment on their own work, that of a peer, or that of a sample student.
- Complete an “error analysis.” Show how a fake student has solved a problem incorrectly. Then, ask your students to explain where the student went wrong and what their likely thought process was.
For Harmonize users:
Strategy 8: Embrace AI as a critical thinking partner
Now that we’ve tiptoed into revamping assessments in ways to make them ai resilient, let’s get to the future where we need to EMBRACE AI AS A CRITICAL THINKING PARTNER because that’s the world our students are entering:
- Build your assessment from the start to be clear about how to leverage AI as a partner in the critical thinking process. If you aren’t sure what that means, paste in your assessment and ask AI to help you think critically about this!
- Have your students share a log of how they used AI to challenge their own ideas and develop their own inquiry process for any assessment.
- Encourage them to take their first draft and initial ideas and use AI to help them make it better…challenge their own assumptions. Tell them to explicitly ask AI to encourage their depth of learning of both the topic and of themselves as learners.
- Have them pretend chat with an AI historical figure who is an expert in the topic at hand!
For Harmonize users:
Conclusion
Few assessments are truly “AI proof,” but we can make our assessments AI resilient by incorporating non-text elements, inviting students to interact with each other, and asking students to document processes and provide reflections. These practices make it more difficult for students to use AI, but they are also just good learning tools:
- Allowing and inviting submissions in different modalities is part of Universal Design for learning.
- Promoting student-to-student interactions helps meet RSI (regular and substantive interaction) requirements and also promotes good life skills.
- Asking students to document their process and then reflect on it helps them build project management skills and deepen their understanding of both the topic and of themselves as learners.
When we design assessments that are challenging for AI but that also provide students with quality learning experiences, we create a situation where students are more likely to do their own work–and they are also more likely to learn something valuable in the process.
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