Writing assessments given to Year 10 students are to be marked by AI. Photo: 123RF
The Qualifications Authority says it is pushing ahead with the use of AI for exam-marking, while raising doubts about its misuse by school students.
Appearing before the Education and Workforce Select Committee for its annual review on Wednesday, NZQA officials told MPs that artificial intelligence created risks for the integrity of internal assessment, yet 80 percent of NCEA credits last year came from internal assessed work.
The authority's chief executive Grant Klinkum told MPs it was providing data to inform the government's work on the NCEA qualification.
He said an example of that data was the fact that last year 80 percent of NCEA credits achieved were through internal assessment and 20 percent were through external assessments.
"Now, if you think about the risks of AI-generated assessment in the internal context, you might hope for a different balance between internal and external, because one reason for external assessment is that it helps triangulate the results that are achieved internally," he said.
"AI is clearly a challenge for the education system generally, and of course a huge opportunity, but insofar as it's a challenge that would lead you to ask, is 20 percent of final results from external sufficient in the current environment."
Klinkum said NZQA was itself using automated test scoring.
"In May of this year, for the first time we will use automated test scoring for the writing assessments that are administered to Year 10," he said.
"In effect, this is AI doing the first sweep of marking."
Klinkum said the decision followed a trial of automated marking of the work of 36,000 learners which found an agreement rate of 80 percent - the same as if humans did the marking.
He said automated test scoring would do the first round of marking from the May writing tests.
"We will then mark 40 percent either side of the boundary between pass and fail through human marking so at least 20,000 items of ATS-marked material will then be check-marked by humans to make sure that anyone a few points away from the boundary is not disadvantaged.
"And of course the human check-marking will prevail if there's any difference in opinion," Klinkum said.
He said the change would enable NZQA to return results to students faster.
"This enables us to return those assessments to schools and students earlier so that they've got an opportunity to prepare for the next assessment a couple of months later if they have failed the writing assessment first time round," he said.
RNZ last year reported some schools were changing the way they assessed students because of the threat of AI cheating.
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