4.4. Designing Authentic and AI-Ready Assessment
Kristin Clark
Authentic assessment is not a new idea, but in the age of AI it becomes essential. Instead of relying on detection, faculty can design tasks that highlight creativity, process, and personal context—qualities AI tools cannot easily replicate. This chapter explores how to design AI-ready assessments that encourage curiosity and integrity while reducing incentives for misuse.
What Is AI-Ready Assessment?
AI-ready assessment refers to assignments and evaluation practices that are intentionally designed to acknowledge the presence of AI tools while still centering student learning, originality, and meaning-making. Rather than ignoring or prohibiting AI, AI-ready design anticipates how students might use it and builds in structures that make authentic engagement unavoidable.
By contrast, traditional assessment often emphasizes recall, repetition, and product over process—for example, a generic essay prompt, a closed-book multiple-choice test, or a set of routine problem exercises. These tasks are increasingly easy for AI systems to generate at scale, which can undermine integrity and reduce learning value.
AI-ready assessments differ in three crucial ways:
- Integration: They assume AI exists and may even invite its use, but in ways that require annotation, critique, or contextualization from the student.
- Authenticity: They require personal, local, or disciplinary connections that AI cannot supply on its own.
- Transparency: They clearly communicate expectations about when and how AI is acceptable, reducing ambiguity and temptation.
In short: traditional assessment asks only for the product; AI-ready assessment illuminates the process, context, and meaning behind it.
Principles of AI-Ready Assessment
- Context-rich: Anchor tasks in local, disciplinary, or personal context. AI struggles with specificity tied to a student’s own experience.
- Iterative: Require drafts, peer feedback, and revisions. Assessment becomes a journey, not just a final product.
- Higher-order thinking: Focus on analysis, synthesis, and evaluation rather than simple recall.
- Process-oriented: Give weight to reflection, annotated drafts, or planning documents.
- Creative and multimodal: Invite students to produce videos, infographics, or podcasts alongside text. AI is strong at text prediction, but less at integrating lived voice and perspective.
📖 Analogy: Designing a Research Expedition (click to expand)
Designing assessment in the age of AI is like planning a research expedition. If you only ask for the final coordinates, anyone can look them up. But if you require maps, journals, sketches, and reflections from along the way, you see the traveler’s process. Authentic assessment values the path as much as the destination.
Examples of AI-Ready Assessment
Consider how a traditional assignment can be reimagined for authenticity:
| Traditional Prompt | AI-Ready Revision |
|---|---|
| Write a 5-page essay on climate change causes. | Interview a local community member about how climate change has impacted their work or life. Incorporate their perspective with research, then reflect on implications for your field. |
| Summarize Hamlet’s themes in 3 pages. | Write a dialogue between Hamlet and a contemporary public figure of your choice. Use this imagined exchange to illustrate enduring themes of power, grief, and decision-making. |
| Complete a problem set with 10 math exercises. | Solve the first 3 problems with full work shown, then design 2 original problems of your own that demonstrate the same concepts. Explain why they matter in real-world contexts. |
Why It Matters
Detection-first strategies breed mistrust. Design-first strategies cultivate curiosity. When students know assignments reward originality, process, and voice, they are less tempted to outsource their work to AI. Authentic, AI-ready assessment is not about restricting technology but about expanding what counts as meaningful learning.
Video Resource: AI-Ready Authentic Assessment
Quick Self-Check
Choose the best answer(s) based on the principles of AI-ready assessment. Some questions have more than one correct option.
📚 Weekly Reflection Journal
Reflection Prompt: Think of one assignment you currently give in your course. How might you adapt it into an AI-ready assessment?
- What elements of process (drafts, feedback, revisions) could you make more visible?
- Where might you add context (personal, local, or disciplinary) to make the task more authentic?
- Would AI have any productive role to play (e.g., brainstorming, grammar support, comparison)?
Looking Ahead
Next up, 4.5 Rubrics and Transparency as Integrity Tools examines how clear criteria and communication can reinforce trust and guide authentic assessment.
