Looking into how AI affects written assessments.

For decades, the take-home essay has been a cornerstone of education. Students were given time to research, think, and write, and the final product was treated as a fair reflection of their understanding. Generative AI has quietly broken that assumption. A student can now type a prompt and receive a polished, well-structured response in seconds. As a result, unsupervised written assessments no longer reliably measure what a student actually knows.

Unless these tasks are completed using software that prevents students from prompting AI to write for them, such as locked-down browsers or supervised writing environments, take-home written assessments are essentially obsolete as a measure of inidividual ability. Educators who continue to rely on them risk grading the AI rather than the student. That is unfair to the students who do the work honestly, ad it undermines the value of the qualitification itself.

However, the answer is not to ban AI or pretend it does not exist. Avoiding AI is not progressive . It is already part of how people research, write and work, and students will be expected to use it in their careers.So instead, education should focus on teaching students to use it well and safely.

Used properly, AI can be a powerful learing tool. It can explain a difficult concept in a different way, generate practice questions, give feedback on a draft, or help a student work out where their reasoning went wronge. The key distinction is between AI that supports thinking and AI that replaces it.

Assessments must therefore evolve. Supervised tasks, oral assessements, in--class writing can measure genuine understanding. Meanwhile, coursework can openly incorporate AI, rewarding students who use it critically and transparently. The goal is not to fight the technology, but to ensure students remain the ones doing the learning.