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NSW is poised to become the first state to attempt to protect its high school credential from the threat of Artificial Intelligence by trialing a moratorium on take-home assessment tasks for year 12 Higher School Certificate students.
In a world where reading is declining and the nexus between literacy and the rise of democracy is increasingly attacked by AI-generated text and opinion disguised as fact, the NSW Education Standards Authority has for the first time identified an alarming and steep rise in HSC cheating fuelled by AI in timed exams, take-home tasks and practical assessments.
The Herald’s Christopher Harris reports the Education Minister Prue Car has written to the NESA seeking the moratorium on take-home assessment tasks from next term when current year 11 students begin their year 12 studies.
She said the purpose of schooling was to build knowledge, judgment, resilience and critical thinking over time, but that faced being undermined if students were using AI. “The value of the HSC as a highly trusted credential depends on it accurately reflecting student knowledge, ability, and understanding. That confidence will be undermined if assessment outputs can be produced without students performing the intellectual work that the course requires,” Car said.
HSC assignments have been controversial since the 2008 Independent Commission Against Corruption investigation into allegations that some students attending a private tutoring business had received improper assistance for work ultimately submitted as part of their HSC assessment.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022 and sparked a rush to find ways to exploit the technology. From the jump, we’ve been trying to distinguish between AI and human-written content.
A recent report found about half of teachers surveyed in NSW did not know how to stop students from using AI to cheat. It also found that AI bypasses the need for students to produce the cognitive effort to learn.
Other large, randomised control trials tracking students’ learning have found unrestricted access to AI improved short-term performance but ultimately damaged learning.
Using AI is not only is an aid to cheats, but it also carries a widely unacknowledged danger, presciently noted by the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
He wrote the problem with writing with AI is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs: “As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.”
So AI unfettered is bad for your brain, democracy and the wider society.
A number of countries have introduced policies to restrict or ban the use of AI tools in schools. NSW will become the first jurisdiction in Australia to take such a measure for its high school credential.
The Minns government’s no-nonsense reaction to the NESA finding acknowledges the problems associated with new technology endangering learning, with cheating so rife it’s undermining the credibility of the education system.
It is a clear-eyed response to the new realities of students using AI, and the education system’s need to be able to produce students with skills and knowledge to think for themselves.
The interim measure will be part of a broader review. The Herald welcomes this: continued vigilance is required on how new technology, including AI, is slipping into schools from kindergarten onwards.
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