English Regulator Warns Universities of Sanctions Over AI-Written Coursework
The English higher education regulator, the Office for Students, requires universities to safeguard assessment formats against AI-generated work and holds out the prospect of sanctions.
The English higher education regulator, the Office for Students, has warned universities that they must expect sanctions if they do not adapt their assessment formats to the use of artificial intelligence. In the authority's view, fair grading of coursework is hardly possible under current conditions. The regulator sees this not merely as a technical problem, but as a question of trust in the qualification that an academic degree is supposed to certify.
The occasion is an investigation by the authority, whose findings show that students were able to submit AI-written work without this being detected. It is also noticeable that many students later can hardly reproduce what was in the texts they submitted. According to the regulator's account, it follows that the competence behind the submissions is not reliably demonstrated. In this reading, a coursework essay no longer proves beyond doubt that its author actually masters the subject matter.
The authority is therefore urging universities to return to traditional, invigilated examinations, in which students work under supervision and without digital aids. The aim is to protect the credibility of academic degrees, which matter equally to employers and graduates. The regulator thus makes clear that it sees responsibility for designing assessments as lying with the universities themselves, but that it is prepared to intervene in cases of failure.
The regulator did not specify in the available information which sanctions are concretely threatened. Nor are deadlines by which universities must change their assessment formats known. Figures on how many students or how many universities are affected are also lacking. The authority's investigation thus provides the finding, but not the full extent of the phenomenon.
Source: the-decoder.com
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