University of Tasmania to strengthen assessment oversight due to AI — ABC News Australia

The University of Tasmania in Australia will place greater emphasis on in-person and supervised assessments to ensure students do not rely exclusively on artificial intelligence to earn a degree. Under the new standard, the university’s courses must demonstrate to external auditors that students have achieved the specified learning outcomes, ABC News Australia reports.

Verifying authorship of work

The university developed the standard jointly with Proudly Human, a company that certifies human participation. The institution will have to confirm that its courses provide an appropriate balance between supervised and unsupervised assessments.

University of Tasmania Vice-Chancellor Luke Bereznicki said that without a careful approach to assessment formats, a student could receive a degree even though the university would not know whether they completed the work independently or used AI tools. Supervised conditions, he said, involve verifying the student’s identity, confirming authorship of the work and monitoring its completion.

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External audit and in-person formats

Proudly Human founder Alan Finkel explained that the university itself will determine the types of assignments, but in-person formats will be preferred. Possible options include writing an essay in a classroom, an oral defence or a supervised exam. If an assessment takes place online, the institution must introduce procedures capable of confirming that the student completed the work independently.

Proudly Human auditors plan to review these processes once or twice a year, considering possible scenarios of AI use during assessments. The University of Sydney introduced a similar approach in 2024: it divided assessments into supervised and unsupervised formats and recommended that courses combine both types.

Jack Oates Pryor, president of the University of Tasmania Students’ Association, said that some students are concerned about a possible decline in the perceived value of degrees due to AI misuse. Deakin University education professor Thomas Corbin added that institutions are increasingly returning to in-person and oral formats while reconsidering which knowledge and skills should be assessed in the AI era.