Assessment with AI
Original work: "Educators' guide to multimodal learning and Generative AI" — Tünde Varga-Atkins, Samuel Saunders, et al. (2024/25) — CC BY-NC 4.0
Adapted for UK Nursing Education by: Lincoln Gombedza, RN (LD)
Last Updated: December 2025
The rapid evolution of Generative AI challenges traditional essay-based assessment. This section explores how nursing education can move from "policing" students (which is increasingly inaccurate) to "designing" assessments that are authentic and AI-resilient.
The Paradigm Shift
| Traditional Assessment | AI-Era Assessment |
|---|---|
| Product-Focused | Process-Focused |
| "Write an essay about..." | "Critique this AI essay about..." |
| Testing recall of facts | Testing application of knowledge in novel contexts |
| Written only | Multimodal (Video, Audio, Diagram, Viva) |
Key Principles
- AI Resilience: Design tasks that rely on human-specific skills (emotional intelligence, reflection on practice, real-time clinical reasoning).
- Assessment FOR Learning: Use AI to give students immediate formative feedback to improve their work before submission.
- Authenticity: Simulate real-world nursing tasks (e.g., handover, discharge planning) rather than abstract academic tasks.
In This Section
Multimodal Assessment
Strategies for designing assessments that are harder to fake, including Vivas, Video Vlogs, and "Show Your Working" tasks.
AI-Enabled Feedback
How to use AI to provide "Pre-flight checks" for students and assist marking, with Strict Privacy Warnings.
Nursing Examples
A library of prompts for educators to generate rubrics, exam questions, and model answers.
Research (e.g., Weber-Wulff et al.) suggests that AI detection software is unreliable and prone to false positives, especially against non-native English speakers. Focus on assessment design, not detection software.