by Professor Guy Littlefair is Vice-Chancellor (Education and Student Experience) at UWA.
Those of us who work in universities are acutely aware that AI is a double-edged sword. While some may think we are asleep at the wheel while AI invades every aspect of teaching and learning, the reality is quite different.
Like all organizations, higher education institutions have been grappling with how to identify and mitigate the risks of AI while making it work for us for several years.
If you’ve attended a higher education conference in recent years, you’ve probably noticed an increased focus on AI and how we can and should learn how to work with it.
The University of Western Australia has taken several steps to address AI issues. Most important is the decision not to use any AI detection tools.
This decision was not taken lightly or without serious consideration. We have been closely monitoring developments in this field, and there is growing evidence that such tools are unreliable, unfair, and inappropriate for high-stakes assessment decisions.
Other universities in Australia and WA take a similar view. Some companies have chosen not to use AI detectors, while others have chosen to stop using AI detectors. At least half of the group’s eight universities decided not to use any AI detection tools.
There have been numerous reports of university students being accused of cheating as a result of AI cheating.
Rather than engaging in an adversarial and punitive process based on dubious academic evidence, we strongly believe that the key to protecting the integrity of our assessments, and ultimately our degrees, is to rethink how we evaluate student achievement.
That’s why we prioritize redesigning student assessments to enhance validity, author assurance, and academic integrity.
We have committed resources to supporting staff to redesign their assessments. Our learning and assessment design team has only been around for six months, but we’ve already delivered assessment and feedback workshops to around 350 participants.
Alongside clear guidelines for the appropriate use of AI in assessment, work is underway to share examples of GenAI resilient assessment with faculty.
UWA has decided that its learning and assessment design team will work in conjunction with the Academic Integrity Unit (somewhat unusual in the Australian higher education sector).
This year, we are also introducing a new consistency centralization process and improved reporting system to reduce the administrative burden on faculty and staff and better align misconduct reporting with assessment redesign.
Both teams are located within the new Center for Integrity and Impact in Teaching Excellence and will act as a vital support hub for staff, as well as providing support in the use of digital tools available to address integrity issues, such as Cadmus and Feedback Fruits.
We are undertaking a comprehensive and wide-ranging review of the University’s assessment and academic integrity policies and will share these reviews for consultation later this year.
It is important to note that universities still make extensive use of unproctored final exams. For example, in 2025, approximately 98,000 students took these secure supervised exams. As such, we will continue to require students to substantively demonstrate their learning in a safe environment.
We understand that addressing the challenges associated with the widespread adoption of GenAI in universities is difficult. However, we remain committed to supporting our staff and students to implement this new technology in a responsible and ethical manner, while maintaining our non-negotiable guarantees for student learning.
These are extremely difficult times for universities, but the most significant technological disruption since the advent of the Internet in the 1990s requires more than Band-Aid fixes and “business as usual but flawed tools” approaches.
Student cheating is not a new problem, but we need to get smarter about how we deal with it. We are fortunate to have some of the brightest minds here at UWA, and we are confident that we will be able to meet this challenge in the coming years.
