Wellington school's drastic move to combat students using AI

Wellington school teacher's move to combat students using AI for assessments

The head of science at St Patrick's College in Wellington says they're moving to make sure that all assessments in his department are done in the classroom under supervision to combat misuse of artificial intelligence.

Doug Walker told Checkpoint the school was using AI detectors but they had not been reliable.

"Realistically the AI detectors, you know you can pop text into the AI detector and then run it through another AI to reword it and it reduces the percentage of AI that's reported, so it's quite easy to get around those systems."

Their strategy comes as the Education Review Office on Thursday released a report saying AI is becoming part of everyday life and schools want more formal guidance on it from the Education Ministry.

The Education Review Office (ERO) found that 40 percent of secondary students had misused artificial intelligence for their schoolwork, though less than half that figure admitted to using it to cheat in assessments.

Walker said many universities had also gone back to having students in a hall completing an assessment in one time block and not having access to technology.

"That's one way of approaching the problem so that we're not dealing with reports where students are accessing them outside of class time, where maybe there's not the supervision to make sure that it is that student's work."

Walker said in his experience the place where AI had been misused most frequently was in "report-style internal assessments under NCEA".

"So students who are using it to research something, to paraphrase something and maybe aren't getting that same learning as you might from working through concepts yourself, you're relying on another tool to do it."

But Walker said there were also many useful ways for students to use AI that teachers could encourage.

One example was the use of AI agents, he said.

"So students can use this as a like a really quick way of getting some guidance and it can be created by the teacher to support the learning without giving a direct answer."

Walker said one Year 10 student last year who was using quite advanced calculus said he had taught it to himself using AI.

The student had conversations with an AI agent and had learned a lot of his skills that way, he said.

It was a question of whether students could learn themselves or whether they relied too heavily on AI, he said.

"In my mind in the classroom, you're you know creating opportunities where students have to engage critically with the concepts that they're being taught without relying on some sort of intermediary tool as much as possible."

In terms of creating consistent guidelines that could operate throughout the country, Walker said he was not convinced that there could be a "one size fits all".

"I approve of ERO's recommendation that we should have some sort of national guidance on AI but I think it'll look very different depending on the schools of the teacher and the content that's being taught as well."

Walker said a lot of schools' AI policies now are around assessment rather than promoting its effective use.

He said it would be great to further develop AI policies, but more time and funded would be needed.

Teachers only had limited time and their current focus was on the government's new curriculum, he said.