Keynote: Professor Cath Ellis

From Policing to Purpose: Inspiring Innovation Through Assessment that Inspires and Assures

Across the HE sector, around the world, Generative AI has unsettled long-established assessment practices, often prompting responses framed by avoidance, detection and control. Alongside this, however, a different trajectory is emerging across the Australian higher education sector, with institutions rethinking assessment to better align with the realities of an AI-enabled world.

This session draws on these developments starting with the landscape of advocacy work that has emerged under the auspices of the Higher Education Integrity Unit that is part of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). It then goes on to focus on Western Sydney University’s Inspire and Assure (IA) Approach to Assessment. 

The IA Approach recentres assessment on the university’s core purpose: to inspire and assure student learning. It distinguishes between tasks that motivate students to engage with their classes and to do the work of learning (inspire), and those that verify that learning genuinely resides in the student through observable evidence (assure).

In this reframing, generative AI is not positioned as a problem to eliminate, but as part of the context in which authentic learning now takes place. Assessment design accommodates its use in unsupervised settings, while relying on secure or otherwise verifiable activities to confirm attainment before credit is awarded.

These shifts are supported by policy settings that redefine what counts as evidence of learning and how it is assured.

Seen together, these changes point to a rebalancing of priorities by bringing practice back into alignment with purpose. Together we are creating the conditions for teaching and learning that not only inspire and assure, but also recognise and celebrate student learning in ways that reconnect teaching staff and students with the work at the heart of the university.