Key Takeaways: Nuventive’s eighth webinar in our 10-part artificial intelligence series explores how AI can support meaningful assessment in higher education without compromising academic integrity.
Webinar Details: Documenting Achievement: Is There a Role for AI in Higher Education Assessment?
Recorded: April 4, 2024
Featured Speakers:
Dr. Jenn Klein, Director, Institutional Assessment Systems, Gonzaga University
Dr. Jessica Cannon, Associate Professor of History, University of Central Missouri
Moderated by:
Dr. Jim Moran, Advisor to Nuventive
Each week, we distill key takeaways and share short clips from our conversations with presidents, provosts, and leaders in institutional research, assessment, and technology—turning big ideas into practical steps for improvement.
This week, we explore where artificial intelligence can strengthen higher education assessment — and where human judgment must remain central. What emerged were clear themes about efficiency, quality, and the importance of safeguarding both privacy and academic integrity.
AI as a Time-Saver for Meaningful Assessment
Supporting a focus on interpretation, improvement, and student learning
A recurring theme was time — how little faculty have, and how AI can help recover some of it. As Dr. Klein highlighted, everyone needs more time. With attention spans narrowing every day, AI’s ability to accelerate low-level tasks becomes deeply valuable.
She shared how AI allowed her to instantly summarize hundreds of open-ended survey responses from Gonzaga seniors: “It gave me 16 bullet points of the things that all those hundreds of students were saying that we can then use our human lens to look over and ask, ‘is this accurate?’”
Instead of manually coding hundreds of comments, she could rapidly spot trends, discover hidden gems, and begin aligning findings with strategic goals, accreditation themes, or learning outcomes. This type of support, she emphasized, doesn’t replace expertise — it frees experts to apply it.
Dr. Cannon echoed this, calling AI an additional lens that can reduce bias in qualitative analysis: “Sometimes the coding, we can introduce our own biases to it. So, it also gives you another lens of looking at the data.”
Improving Assessment Quality with AI
Enhancing alignment, clarity, and insight across the curriculum
Both panelists emphasized AI’s potential to support high-quality assessment when used intentionally.
Dr. Klein noted that AI can help faculty examine student work more consistently by customizing prompts: “The prompt is the key. What are you asking the artificial intelligence tool to do?”
She described how instructors can ask AI to analyze clarity of argument, use of evidence, recency of citations, or even generate rubrics tailored to specific criteria.
The tools can also help detect patterns across large datasets: “What we love about big data and what artificial intelligence can do for us is how it can really aggregate and then even disaggregate data.”
Dr. Cannon added that AI can help faculty design and shift measurable learning. It can also recommend new approaches to assessment — especially higher-order tasks that AI cannot easily replicate. AI tools, she noted, make it “helpful in brainstorming and helping people write the assessments themselves.”
Closing Gaps with the Help of AI
Helping institutions identify patterns to improve student outcomes
Dr. Moran raised the example of programs aiming for 80 percent mastery and asked how AI might help the other 20 percent.
Dr. Cannon highlighted adaptive learning opportunities, practice environments, and tools that allow faculty to train chatbots with their own prompts, examples, and vocabulary. Students can then practice skills in a guided, low-stakes environment. “This can be another tool to help them practice when there’s not a way built into the class or the faculty schedule to provide that one-on-one support.”
AI for Curriculum Development and Workforce Readiness
Strengthening course design, sequencing, and lifelong learning pathways
Both panelists described how AI is already being used to help design learning objectives, scale assessments, scaffold skills, and identify weak points in course or program structure. AI can also uncover where students struggle in sequence-based programs and uncover bottlenecks in achievement. Dr. Cannon emphasized how AI can help identify those patterns and then bring them back to curriculum design.
For workforce preparation, Dr. Klein discussed how Gonzaga is building systems to compare students’ incoming interests with their postgraduate outcomes. By integrating data across enrollment, advising, involvement, and career outcomes, AI can help institutions spot correlations and build clearer pathways from interests to careers. She also described AI as a lifelong learning partner, adding to a learner’s toolkit.
Protecting Integrity, Privacy, and Human Judgment
Ensuring assessment remains authentic, secure, and grounded in human expertise
While optimistic, both panelists were clear: meaningful assessment requires guardrails. Dr. Cannon addressed integrity concerns, cautioning that assessments must continue to evolve toward reflective work, project-based learning, comparative analysis, and citation-rich tasks that AI can struggle to perform authentically.
A major concern, she said, is privacy, and she advised adopting policies that define the types of data that institutional representatives share with AI.
Dr. Klein reinforced the importance of using closed AI systems as a first layer of protection to ensure data security, and that AI can never replicate the full richness of human experience. Human insight remains irreplaceable.
Conclusion
Embracing AI as a tool to enhance higher education
The webinar highlighted a balanced view: AI is neither a shortcut nor a threat — it is a powerful support system when guided by human expertise, thoughtful policy, and clear faculty judgment. From improving efficiency to deepening insight into student learning, AI can meaningfully strengthen assessment practices — when used responsibly.
Both panelists made one message clear: we are at a turning point, and higher education should embrace the opportunity with care, creativity, and strong human leadership.
Looking Forward
Next in the series
Up next in our AI webinar series, we turn to the role of artificial intelligence in IT leadership and digital strategy across higher education.
Riding the Next Wave: IT’s Role in Harnessing AI in Higher Education
This session features two leading voices in IT and innovation as they explore how institutional technology leaders can guide their campuses into an AI-enabled future.
Featuring:
- Dr. José-Marie Griffiths, President, Dakota State University
- Rashmi Radhakrishnan, VP Enrollment Management, Technology & Innovation/CIO, Arcadia University
Moderated by:
Richard N. Katz, founder and leader of a firm dedicated to supporting the effective uses of IT in higher education. He held executive posts at the National University of Singapore, Nuventive, LLC, EDUCAUSE, and the University of California.
Recorded: June 12, 2024
Interested in learning more about the Nuventive Improvement Platform?