by Lydia Watson, Educational Developer, CTE
Our faculty colleagues continue to navigate the GenAI assault on education with deep care and commitment. Over the past few years, they have worked hard to listen to students, temper their confusion, ensure academic integrity, and let learners know that their voices matter. They strive to see evidence of learning. They want to witness growth and progress. Their disheartening experiences are real. After thoughtful conversations about why it may be best to write without the assistance of Gen AI, they still encounter papers clearly shaped by it as evidenced by the sycophantic prose spit out at the end, left unremoved from the page. Their worry that some students will be left behind despite all efforts is palpable.
In The Wicked Problem of AI and Assessment, Thomas Corbin and colleagues argue that the challenges GenAI poses to higher education assessment should be understood through the lens of “wicked problems,” as defined by Rittel and Webber. Based on interviews with twenty university instructors, the authors found that GenAI’s impact on assessment exhibits all ten characteristics of a wicked problem — resisting definitive solutions and involving complex, interconnected trade-offs.
They offer three “permissions” for moving forward, centered on allowing educators to exercise their own professional judgment under continued conditions of ambiguity. And one more permission might be added: Permission to accept that educators are slogging through this quicksand of uncertainty together — with shared experiences, innovative practices, and a quiet refusal to let go of hope.
Across classrooms, faculty, like Rosemarie Perkin from the School of Business, continue to respond with creativity by implementing activities like polling students on whether they feel AI should or should not be used in assignments, incorporating oral discussions into existing assessments, and designing deep reflective questions that encourage students’ own voice and autonomy.
These examples demonstrate the ways in which our colleagues are “compromising, diverging, and iterating” (Corbin et al., 2025) when it comes to their assessment practices. Despite these sustained challenges, they continue to show up with integrity, curiosity and care.
Corbin, T., Bearman, M., Boud, D., & Dawson, P. (2025). The wicked problem of AI and assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2025.2553340
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