Overview

Assessment Reimagined builds on the foundations of work undertaken in 2025. It is a whole-of-university exploration and design initiative to redefine the purpose, principles, and expectations of assessment in an AI-enabled world. Through open provocations, workshops, forums, and structured feedback, the project will invite staff and students to challenge inherited assessment assumptions and codesign a distinctive assessment model for UOW, one that is future-focused, integrity-embedded, and meaningfully aligned with disciplinary and professional expectations.

Strategic deliverables

• A distinctive, future-focused UOW Assessment Model that defines the purpose, principles, and expectations of assessment in an AI-enabled world.

• A practical implementation roadmap outlining policy alignment, capability supports, and requirements for university-wide adoption.

• A mechanism for continuous review and renewal of assessment practices to ensure responsiveness to emerging technologies and educational trends.

Why this matters

Many inherited assessment models were designed for pre-AI contexts and no longer consistently provide valid, authentic evidence of student learning. Generative AI is fundamentally reshaping how students learn, how knowledge is demonstrated, and how professions evaluate capability. To maintain the integrity of learning outcomes, assessment will need to evolve toward authenticity and genuine capability development. This project will ensure UOW can proactively respond to these shifts, rather than relying on outdated practices or unenforceable AI restrictions. By re-examining assessment’s purpose, functions, and design principles, the initiative will strengthen the relationship between assessment, learning, and future employability. It will also ensure that assessment practices remain aligned with TEQSA’s expectations regarding AI-related assessment integrity risks, while supporting innovation that enhances the student experience.

How it works

At the centre of the project will be the Assessment Think Tank, a cross-faculty group comprising Deputy Deans (Education), Heads of School, and academic leaders (including Academic Program Directors, Associate Heads of School and Deputy Heads of School, [Education]) selected through an open expression-of-interest process. This group will act as the project’s intellectual “engine room”, interrogating key assessment provocations such as grading, integrity, authenticity, feedback, and programmatic assessment, while synthesising insights from staff and student engagement. The wider university community will contribute through provocations, forums, workshops, and structured feedback activities, ensuring the Assessment Model is grounded in diverse perspectives and contemporary evidence.

Provocation Series: Igniting Institutional Conversation 

Throughout May 2026, this curated series of eight two hour online sessions will bring together leading national and international thinkers in assessment, pedagogy, and AI. Open to all UOW staff across all campuses, the series marks the beginning of Assessment Reimagined and invites the university community to rethink the role and purpose of assessment in an AI shaped world. Each session is designed to surface tensions, challenge assumptions, and explore future facing possibilities for assessment that better supports learning and student success. Sessions will be interactive, recorded for later viewing, and supported by an online space for ongoing reflection, dialogue, and feedback.

Check out the program below and register now.

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  TUES 5 MAY
  1 PM - 3 PM

  Provocation 1: Do we need assessment as we now know it?

  Distinguished Professor David Boud

  Today’s assessment practices are relics of a bygone era, built for a world before generative AI, before accountability, before the collapse of old certainties. Deakin Distinguished Professor David Boud challenges us to confront a hard truth: most of our common, normal assessment practices are no longer fit for purpose. If we are to meet the needs of learners, educators, and society, we must radically reimagine assessment for a post-digital, engaged world. The call is urgent. The change must be profound, and on many fronts. And it starts with us. 
  
  Note: This is a hybrid event, with online and on-campus attendance available. Register via the link below. Follow-up correspondence will ask you to nominate on-campus attendance for dietary requirements, etc. 

  Review the recording of this event (opens in new tab)

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  THUR 7 MAY
  1 PM - 3 PM

  Provocation 2: What Happens to Being Human in the Age of AI?

  Carlo lacono 
  
  What does it mean to educate when machines can imitate thought, simulate presence, and generate artefacts indistinguishable from human work? How do we safeguard the conditions for human flourishing—not just outputs—when machines make competence look effortless? And if the distinction between “human” and “machine” thinking dissolves at the level of performance, what becomes worthy of education itself? This provocation explores how AI exposes deep assumptions about human identity, cognition, and the purpose of education, and how its presence reframes our understanding of human relevance, agency, attention, and creative practice. 

  Review the recording for this event (opens in new tab)

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  MON 11 MAY
  1 PM - 3 PM

  Provocation 3: The Cognitive Dissonance in Our Universities 

  Professor Lambert Schuwith

  Universities face a troubling contradiction: while they promote collaboration, trust, complexity, and lifelong learning in their educational rhetoric, assessment practices often remain grounded in competition, individualism, and reductionism. These tensions are not new, but with technology enabling students to bypass outdated systems, the risks are growing. Professor Lambert Schuwirth challenges us to confront this dissonance, and to ask whether assessment can ever be credible if it doesn’t reflect the values we espouse, or worse, if it undermines them.

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  WED 13 MAY
  3 PM - 5 PM

  Provocation 4: The End of Unit-Level Assessment?

  Professor Liesbeth Baartman

  The era of unit-level assessment is over. In a world reshaped by generative AI, fragmented, one-off tasks no longer provide reliable or meaningful evidence of student learning. They distort what we see, overemphasise isolated performance, and leave us blind to the bigger picture. Professor Liesbeth Baartman argues that if we want assessment to remain credible, we must embrace programmatic models that build coherent, trustworthy pictures of learning over time. 

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  MON 18 MAY
  1 PM - 3 PM

  Provocation 5: Beware the Siren Song of gen AI Feedback

  Professor Elizabeth Molloy

  When we hear about the problems with feedback in higher education, including how resource-intensive it is to provide students with meaningful information (and to follow up what happens next), it’s easy to be lured by the siren song of Gen AI feedback.  We know that Gen AI can swiftly generate views or commentary on a student’s work, and ‘accurate’ inputs at that. However, whilst it is easy to focus on speed or accuracy of information, those might be the wrong issues to focus on. Instead, we ought to be far more curious about whether students are motivated to act on what GenAI can offer them.

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  THUR 21 MAY
  1 PM - 3 PM

  Provocation 6: Grading for Whom?

  Dr Juuso Henrik Nieminen

  Grades are often treated as neutral, objective markers of achievement, but they are anything but. From unit marks to GPAs, grading systems shape not just how we assess learning, but how students understand their place in the university. They reward conformity, penalise difference, and often obscure the richness of student learning beneath a veil of numerical precision.

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  TUES 26 MAY
  1 PM - 3 PM

  Provocation 7: Are Learning Outcomes Still Serving Learning?

  Associate Professor Darci Taylor

  Learning outcomes are meant to guide what matters in education. Yet in many institutions, they have become a dense architecture, stacked across graduate attributes, course outcomes, subject outcomes, and professional standards. As generative AI reshapes how students learn and demonstrate capability, we must ask: are learning outcomes helping us focus on the future, or are they holding us back? 

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  WED 27 MAY
  4 PM - 6 PM

  Provocation 8: Beyond Fairness: Reclaiming Assessment for Justice

  Professor Jan McArthur

  As higher education grapples with mounting questions of equity, relevance, and purpose, we must look closely at one of its most taken-for-granted practices: assessment. Fairness, measured through rubrics, standardised criteria, and procedural consistency, is often treated as the gold standard. But what if fairness isn’t enough?
  What might assessment look like if it aimed not just to evaluate academic proficiency, but to support holistic student development and social transformation? And what responsibilities do educators and institutions carry in making that shift?

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Establishment of the Assessment Reimagined Think Tank and Global Dialogue Group

After an EOI application process, the Assessment Reimagined project has established two key groups, representing key university stakeholders:

• The Assessment Reimagined Think Tank brings together a cross-section of the UOW community to shape, test, and translate new ideas into institutionally viable models, via a structured, design-oriented space for sustained collaboration. The Think Tank comprises staff from UOW Australia campuses and the UOW College.
• The Assessment Reimagined Global Dialogue Group brings together academic leaders from across UOW global campuses to participate in a series of online dialogue sessions in June. This group discusses emerging ideas and provide perspectives from global campuses that will feed directly into the project's development of future directions for assessment at UOW.