Step 6 · about 20 minutes
Stress test and commit
Every choice in assessment has a price, and there is no right answer to find. This step names the price, picks one change and turns your notes into a brief.
§01 No right answer
A wicked problem
Thomas Corbin, Margaret Bearman, David Boud and Phillip Dawson (2025) interviewed 20 teachers responsible for assessment design at an Australian university about how they handled AI in their assessments. They analysed the answers with a concept from planning theory: wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973).
Tame or wicked?
A tame problem, a chess problem for instance, can be hard, but it has a solution, and you know when you have found it. A wicked problem has no such solution. Urban planning and poverty are classic examples.
The article concludes that AI in assessment has all the marks of a wicked problem.
It can be framed in many ways
Cheating, validity, AI literacy or workload? It depends on whom you ask, and the framing steers the response.
It is never solved for good
New tools keep coming. What worked last year may not work this year.
Solutions are better or worse, not right or wrong
An oral part is better for some purposes and worse for others.
You can’t try without consequences
A new exam form affects a whole cohort.
Every situation is unique
What works in law may not work in nursing or computing.
Whoever decides carries the consequences
Often the course leader, and often alone.
The teachers described how every measure for more security cost something else, whether realism, creativity or relevance to work. One of them put it roughly like this: if students use AI well, we can never know, and if they use it badly, we can never know that either.
Three permissions
To compromise
No assessment can be secure, authentic, fair, light on resources and good for learning all at once. You may choose what matters most, and say openly what you give up.
To choose differently
Subjects, courses and programmes don’t need the same solution.
To adjust as you go
You may try something, see how it works, and change it next year.
The authors end with a warning, here in our paraphrase: universities that keep chasing the one right answer to AI in assessment will wear out their teachers and fail their students. What you can ask instead is which trade-offs you are willing to make, and why.
§02 Activity
You can’t have it all
Share 15 points between five qualities for your assessment, at most 5 each. When you raise one, the others give way, and you can move them back. There is no right answer here either.
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§03 Worksheet · your assessment
Choose one change
Your assessment: . One change is enough, and the smallest change you will actually make is often better than a big plan that stays in a drawer.
§04 Worksheet · stress test
What does it cost?
Every move has a price, so answer honestly and use the answers to adjust your sketch.
§05 Your brief
One page to take with you
Everything you wrote in the course, in one text. Copy it into a document, download it, or print it.
Talk it through with someone from another subject
The quickest stress test you can run is to give your brief to a colleague and let them ask you five questions about it, the way you questioned the students in Step 4. Why this change? What would happen if it didn’t work? Where does AI help, and where does it stop?
Sources
- Corbin, T., Bearman, M., Boud, D. and Dawson, P. (2025). The wicked problem of AI and assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. Open access. doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2025.2553340
- Rittel, H. W. J. and Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.