Students ‘confused about assessment purpose’ in age of AI

Early career academics feel unsupported when working with students who use artificial intelligence, saying the technology has exacerbated existing issues around confidence and uneven institutional support.

A paper, published by the Staff and Educational Development Association, interviewed early career academics (ECAs) at UK universities on their views on students’ academic writing abilities, and found that AI has made “longstanding tensions more visible”.

ECAs described a “pervasive lack of confidence” among students regarding academic writing, with AI “strengthening” insecurities because students would “compare their writing unfavourably to AI-generated text”.

The paper also found that AI could be “obscuring the need to develop the foundational skills needed in an academic setting”, with ECAs reporting that students were also struggling with the cognitive processes that precede writing, such as critical thinking, evaluation, synthesis and paraphrasing. 

The study says: “ECAs struggle not so much with technology itself, but with navigating unclear ownership of writing development, including inconsistent institutional guidance and students’ uncertainty about what written assignments are for. AI amplified these conditions because it exposed how often writing expectations remain implicit.”

The research comes as student AI use has been described as “near universal”, with some studies putting it as high as 95 per cent.

Kiu Sum, the paper’s lead author and lecturer at London Metropolitan University, said that AI has weakened students’ relationship with academic writing and made the benefits of written assessment less clear to them. 

Sum told Times Higher Education that the ECAs interviewed “frequently observed” that students appeared to see writing “primarily as an assessment task to complete rather than a process for developing disciplinary thinking”. 

“AI has exacerbated students’ confusion about the purpose of written assessments. When AI can generate essays and reports so easily, students are more likely to view writing as a product to be completed rather than a learning process that develops critical thinking, analysis, and communication skills.

“As a result, academics are having to work harder to explain not just what students need to write, but why writing remains an important part of learning and professional development,” Sum said.

Although the study did not directly investigate students’ perspectives, the participating researchers highlighted the need to make the purpose and value of writing more explicit and for greater institutional support in establishing this, she explained. 

“This matters because writing is not simply a means of assessment; it is often a vehicle for learning, developing critical thinking and disciplinary understanding.”

The paper recommends that researchers need support to “clearly and consistently” establish written expectations and “demystify” academic conventions – especially for diverse student cohorts. 

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com