An AI tutor should help a student learn. It should not be the thing that completes the assessed work. A quieter week on my own account, but the conversation that mattered was already underway in New South Wales. University of Sydney expert Professor Danny Liu joined ABC News Mornings to talk about the government's review of AI in classrooms, and about proposals to reconsider take-home assessments. The distinction he drew is the one I keep coming back to as well.
What we mean by an AI tutor is set out on the AI tutor for schools page.
An AI tutor is for learning, not for the mark
Professor Liu welcomed the action, and noted the challenge is to distinguish between using AI as a tool for learning and relying on it to complete assessed work. "We need to differentiate learning from assessments because students may very well use AI in very powerful ways to learn."
That is exactly right, and it is the distinction a lot of school policy still collapses. If the only question you ask is "did AI help produce this piece of work?", you will ban useful learning and still fail to protect assessment. If you ask two questions instead, the design gets clearer. Where is AI allowed to tutor, probe, explain and practise? And where does the student have to show, in conditions we can trust, what they can do themselves?
I think we are heading towards a world where unsupervised take-home tasks cannot carry the weight we have been putting on them. That does not mean AI has no place in the classroom. It means the place it belongs is in the learning, and the assessment has to be designed so that the learning is still the student's.
The review is the start, not the policy
The NSW Government has asked NESA to examine AI's impact on student learning and the integrity of the HSC, including take-home assessment. That review will matter. So will the temptation, in the weeks after a review is announced, to reach for a single rule that feels decisive.
The better path is the slower one Liu pointed at: keep AI in the learning process, and rebuild assessment so it can still tell us what a student knows. I will be watching what comes back from NESA, because getting that split right is more important than whether the headline is a ban, a moratorium, or a new set of conditions.