THE Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) will be working with member countries to develop a responsible generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) policy framework for the regional secondary education system.
Speaking during a virtual media conference on April 14, CXC operations director Dr Nicole Manning said the organisation had created standards and guidelines for the use of AI in assessments.
“Ethical use of AI and academic integrity – we are looking at how students cite its usage in their SBAs and other work. Ensuring data accuracy and privacy – some territories already have data privacy laws in place and CXC encourages the proper use of personal information. Candidates must understand, share and be cognisant of the proper use of personal identification on the web.
“The designing and development of assessments in your own space cannot be business as usual. You can’t just give a candidate a question, they can go home and just give a response from AI. Let’s understand it will require higher-order thinking for performance-based type assessments.”
She said CXC would assist in evaluating assessment processes and products and maintaining measurement principles in item generation and assessment development.
Manning said CXC had been talking to parents and students across the region about what was required during the process. She said there would be several sensitisation sessions to ensure everyone was comfortable.
“Our policy protects candidates, parents and teachers as it shows they need to do things differently. Anyone can go on the computer and come up with anything, but then to evaluate those competencies, we have to say we’re using a performance base.
"How do you literally show/present to me what is required? We have to do things differently and this provides guides and standards for schools, teachers, students and their parents to use.”
Asked how AI could be incorporated in teaching practice, deputy CEO Eduardo Ali said, “We’re working with a more personalised learning model that allows us to use technology, most notably AI, to customise personal instruction to create lesson plans for students in the classroom space. So every teacher will have access to AI to use it for their lesson plans, which will be individual but cohort-based, so every learner does not leave the experience of learning without having a targeted approach, catering to their own personal learning needs.
“We want to ensure that students’ capability to use Gen AI is improved, as the sophistication of AI is increasing daily. We also want to train teachers in how to use Gen AI in teaching and learning and formative assessment.”
Manning said the standard treats with how students are supposed to cite their use of AI, originality, and use of technology.
“We will also be providing an AI assessment scale that tells you the impact on the candidate’s score or grade, the fact that you get no grade because you did not provide the citing, as is currently a requirement for us, whether you are citing a human or whether you’re citing the fact that you’re using AI. Both are important as part of ethical use.”
CXC registrar Wayne Wesley said teachers were being encouraged to build ambiguity into their assignments by asking open-ended questions.
“You have to engage students in more one-on-one conversations to appreciate where students are at and appreciate whether the work they are presenting is truly their own. It also requires us to re-think how assessment is done from a summative and formative standpoint.
"It is important we emphasise the formative aspect of the assessment where you are continuously assessing and making some judgement as to what students are doing over a period of time and so you are not caught with AI being able to give a canned response to an assignment that is summative in nature and someone just wants to submit the end work.
“That’s some of the advice we’ve given to ensure that students intellectual laziness or cognitive decline does not occur, because students will be stimulated to ask the requisite questions and engage the content differently. So we have to think about how we design and develop our assessments.”
70% of regional education ministries have no AI policy
CXC technical innovation director Roger Payne said almost 70 per cent of regional education ministries did not have a formal AI policy or framework in place.
“For us to benefit as a region, we need a harmonious development using the technologies across the board. It’s not going to help us if one state moves ahead quickly and the others are struggling to follow. CXC’s examinations are not territorial and all must benefit from the intervention.”
He said the framework was not prescriptive but provided guidance to governments to establish national policies. He said the assistance provided would facilitate harmonisation and integration with CXC's internal policy and systems for Gen AI.
Payne said the policy framework statements for cultivating a responsible future included preserving academic integrity, ethical and inclusive AI education, teacher training and professional development, curriculum integration, data privacy and security, AI infrastructure and resources, human oversight/involvement, assessment, facilitation of assessment for exceptions and psychosocial impact.
“We must recognise for this to work, infrastructure must get to the last person. Students, teachers, parents, need to be involved. It’s not just about getting it to the school, if you’re doing homework, SBAs and self-driven development, you must be able to do it from home, school, wherever you can participate.”
Payne highlighted some of the factors to be assessed under preserving academic integrity when working with Gen AI or ChatGPT.
“Does the student not take responsibility for the work generated? Our framework is anchored in that personal responsibility. It’s not sufficient to say, the machine did it. The machine may help you to do it, but to preserve academic integrity, honesty, originality, responsibility, respect, fairness, accountability are all key elements that are embodied in the policy framework.”
Ali said CXC would prepare and share a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with ministries and provide technical ideas and suggestions for incorporating policy concepts, principles, guidelines and standards, while ministries would incorporate these aspects and give feedback to CXC, who would use this to further develop its policy.
“This is a collaborative effort as we work together to strengthen the applications of AI, most notably Gen AI, in the response to what students are facing in the teaching, learning and assessment environment. The intended outcomes include a signed MoU with governments; ensuring that as students get access to and use AI, that they use it responsibly, ethically, and know how to use it for their own learning and development and not for any nefarious purposes.
More information on the AI policy framework can be found on CXC’s website at https://www.cxc.org/ai-policy/.
