The ACT government is reviewing a decision by NSW to potentially ban unsupervised take-home assessments for year 12 students as education authorities grapple with the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI).
NSW Education Minister Prue Car wrote to the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) to ask for a moratorium on take-home assessment tasks for Higher School Certificate students.
NESA is now reviewing the impact of AI on student learning and assessment but a ban on take-home assessment tasks could be in force for year 12 students from the start of Term 4.
Concerns around the integrity of take-home assessments was a strong theme when the ACT Board of Senior Secondary Studies did public consultation on its 2026-2030 strategic plan.
An ACT government spokesperson said it was looking at the NSW decision but downplayed the issue of breaches of academic integrity.
"The ACT Government is reviewing the decision by the NSW Government, and the Board of Senior Secondary Studies is continually monitoring the impact of AI in schools," the spokesperson said.
"The number of breaches across the ACT is extremely small with about 0.1 per cent of all assessments having recorded academic integrity issues. These issues include but are not limited to the use of AI."
Australian Catholic University senior lecturer Dr Luke Rowe, a specialist in science of learning and AI and human intelligence, said other states should follow NSW's lead in rethinking take-home assessments.
"It makes sense to follow the lead of NSW because I want to know what the student knows independently of AI's input," Dr Rowe said.
"For me, it's always going to come back to if you want to assess the student's capacity, not the technology's capacity, then you've got to have circumstances that allow you to isolate the student's capacity away from the technology. Take-home exams pose the risk of muddling those two things."
ACT students who use generative AI to substantially research, plan, structure or create a text, image or artwork when this is not permitted in the assessment face penalties for plagiarism.
The penalties range from a reprimand and sitting an alternative assessment through to cancellation of their result in that course. Repeated breaches could mean that student has all of their results for year 11 and 12 cancelled.
ACT schools have introduced validation tasks to accompany take-home assessments, such as submitting notes or drafts, an interview or viva voce, submitting supporting evidence to show the student's process or a test or task done under exam conditions that replicates some of the thinking that went into the unsupervised task.
The ACT also has moderation days twice-yearly and students aiming to get university entry also sit the ACT Scaling Test (AST) to test their higher-order and critical thinking skills.
Dr Rowe said validation tasks and moderation had their place but it was very difficult to completely eliminate the risk of AI interference in unsupervised assessment tasks.
"I don't have high hopes for the future being able to give us reliable software for AI detection," he said.
AI can be used to write essays, create podcasts, build video, write science reports and complete maths tests.
Many higher-education institutions were using oral presentations with a question-and-answer component to effectively assess students' knowledge, Dr Rowe said.
"I'm very pro-learning. I'm not anti-technology, and I think these policy changes are an evolution to recognise the impact of AI in that that context."
