5: Rethinking Learning Assessment in the AI Era Available to Purchase

In earlier chapters of this book, synthetic intelligence was framed as a dynamic partnership between human cognition and artificial intelligence (AI) – an ecosystem where learners, teachers, and AI systems collaborate to co-create knowledge and action. This chapter explores what happens to assessment when this ecosystem evolves.

Generative AI has introduced more than just a new avenue for cheating; it has unsettled the foundational assumptions that have long governed our assessment practices. With a large language model in their pocket, students can now produce well-crafted essays, plausible code, and even passable exam answers, all without fully mastering the underlying skills. Research increasingly shows that traditional take-home assignments no longer reliably reflect a student’s true capabilities (Kizilcec et al., 2024; Xia et al., 2024). At the same time, AI offers the opportunity for rich, personalized feedback at scale – enabling educators to spot patterns and insights in student work that were previously invisible (Ba et al., 2025; Wongvorachan, 2022).