An analysis of first year core courses across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences has revealed that multiple units have switched from essays to exams or shifted from take-home exams to supervised ones in an effort the University of Sydney concedes is to preserve academic integrity.
Majors impacted include Politics, International Relations, Socio-Legal Studies, Asian Studies, and Ancient History which all now have an exam in their first year core unit. These exams often make up half of the students final mark.
Philosophy has also been impacted with the core first year course and the elective unit Society, Knowledge, and Self both now containing exams, replacing multiple short essays.
The University has recently provided new guidance to academics, introducing a two lane system for assessments.
Lane 1 assessments are directly supervised and are designed to test specific skills. This could take the form of an exam or oral interview. Lane 2 assessments are not directly supervised and are for “students to learn, and teach them to engage responsibly with AI.”
Even though many humanities courses are adding exams for the first time, the guidance tells academics that most assessments should still be Lane 2.
When creating assignments of any kind, unit coordinators have to explicitly tell students whether generative AI is allowed.
A University spokesperson told Honi Soit that “we are in the process of overhauling our assessments to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by new technologies such as generative AI.”
Unsecured assessments where generative AI is not allowed are described as “invalid” because, the guidance concedes, “there is no reliable way to prevent or detect the use of generative AI in an assessment that is not supervised.”
The University reported 1038 cases of prohibited AI usage to the regulator in 2023, up from just 92 in 2021. 940 cases of contract cheating were recorded in 2023 and the government has now blocked over 400 websites that offer essay writing services to students.
A first year Politics and History student taking Introduction to International Relations this semester, which had an exam added this year, expressed disappointment at the switch.
“The exam format is less ideal,” she said. She told Honi that important skills like narrow research and revising ideas over multiple drafts were lost in exams.
Another first year Politics major who took the same unit last semester when there was still a final research essay told Honi that “assignments give you flexibility to mould the question in creative ways in the way a time-constrained exam does not.”
Most of the students Honi spoke to thought that the changes were reasonable if the University was concerned about cheating.
SRC Education Officer Grace Street, while conceding that “it is hard to exactly track if and how students are using AI and contract cheating for assessments,” told Honi that the University had to focus on tackling the structural issues students faced rather than just reforming the assessments.
“Untenable class sizes and teacher-student ratios reduce learning quality; the cost-of-living crisis pushes students to sacrifice their studies to work more shifts; extortionate course fees can encourage cheating to avoid the costs of failing a subject,” she said.
Street also thought that exams were largely an ineffective way to teach students in the humanities. “It is an outdated idea that Arts subjects necessitate exams,” she said.
“Being in my fourth year of an Arts degree, I know that the best learning in these subjects comes from assignments that encourage individual research and creativity.”
When asked if students were being consulted on the changes the spokesperson said that “a group of students have been redeveloping the AI in Education website to ensure all students are equipped to productively and responsibly use AI in their learning and assessments.”
“Having a variety of assessments is good teaching practice and our Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is committed to ensuring the integrity of our degrees and providing our students with a world-class educational experience.”
