Perfect Papers, Silent Voices: The Authenticity Gap in AI-Era Education

On my search for tales of what generative AI has done for educators, having been limited to my perspective of only understanding the student side, I wasn't surprised to see that assessments face a key problem. First of all, it's important to establish what assessments set out to do: they are a performative measure of understanding and learning. With generative AI, it seems they have simply become a performative measure and could even drift into a charade.

This is what I call "Perfect Papers, Silent Voices" - the authenticity gap where flawless work masks absent understanding. One of the world's leading theology professors with decades of experience at some of the UK's top Russell Group universities told me that perfect papers are suddenly being produced as generative ai has expanded, but they are missing the students’ voices. Students are producing work they cannot fully defend or explain, as they have offloaded their own expression to the large language models as their burden.

The crisis isn't just about academic dishonesty - it's deeper. When students submit sophisticated analysis but fall silent when asked to elaborate on their arguments, we're witnessing the fundamental breakdown of what assessment was meant to measure. These perfect papers tell us nothing about whether genuine learning has occurred.

Without intervention, what are our heralded education institutions producing? Simply prompt engineers. At VivaEdu, we envision something better for students - we know they can be the leaders of the future, and we believe generative AI plays a part in this. Students should use generative AI, even in their written work. That's fine. But if they are going to develop their voice through their work and research, the ability to express themselves cannot be built and improved through written assessment but through the longstanding use of oral assignments.

Whether it be thinking on your feet, exploring a different angle on a hypothesis, or evaluating your work's shortcomings - all of this intellectual development done through vivas utilising our adaptive question tool presents a multitude of opportunities for growth and the encouragement of intellectual progress through our intelligent assessment platform.

In setting your students vivas, you are not only making them pause and reflect fully on how they think about your course's content, but you are giving them the chance to unlock a whole new perspective which potentially changes their life's outlook. With this in mind, educators should feel they are empowering the next generation of leaders gladly.

Ready to see it in action? Try the free VivaEdu demo

Ben Arkus

CEO of VivaEdu