Assessment
How can schools and employers determine what a person genuinely knows or can do?
Take-home assessment is broken — Mollick's 'Homework Apocalypse' arrived on schedule. The redesign question is what to verify (process? performance under observation?) and at what cost to learning itself.
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What changed
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The credential-validity problem got measured and the responses began: a 20-university, 95,000-student study found about a third regularly use AI on assignments and 9% admit outright cheating, and the visible reaction has been the return of blue books and oral exams — each verifying authorship at a real cost to what it can measure and to equity.
Recent thinking
Patricia Waldron · Cornell Chronicle · 21 May 2026 news
Widespread AI misuse means higher ed must rethink assessmentThe fact that students are misusing GenAI is a problem for assessment validity, and that's a problem for the credibility of university credentials.
Reports the Kizilcec, Chirikov & Smirnov study (Science, 2026) across 20 universities and 95,000+ students: about a third regularly use GenAI on assignments and 9% admit cheating — the largest measurement grounding the 'what does the credential certify' problem.
Josephine Walker · Axios · 14 Mar 2026 news
Blue books make an "out of step" campus comeback in the AI eraColleges besieged by AI-generated writing brought back blue-book exams to deter cheating, but some educators say hand-written tests don't showcase students' best work and disadvantage swaths of learners.
Documents the return of blue books as the live assessment response and surfaces the tradeoff: in-class handwriting verifies authorship but may under-measure ability and disadvantage some learners.
Hengzhi Hu & Harwati Hashim · Educational Researcher · Mar 2026 paper
Oral Assessment in the AI Era—Equity, Validity, and ScaleOperationalize equity by separating language production from disciplinary reasoning and providing targeted accommodations
Peer-reviewed treatment of the other main verification response — oral exams — taking the equity, validity, and scalability objections seriously rather than treating orals as an obvious fix.
Foundational reading (2)
Assessment reform for the age of artificial intelligenceLodge, Dawson et al., TEQSA · 2023The Homework ApocalypseEthan Mollick · 2023