THE Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) will be working with member countries to develop a responsible generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) policy framework for the regional secondary education system.
Speaking during a virtual media conference on April 14, CXC operations director Dr Nicole Manning said the organisation had created standards and guidelines for the use of AI in assessments.
“Ethical use of AI and academic integrity – we are looking at how students cite its usage in their SBAs and other work. Ensuring data accuracy and privacy – some territories already have data privacy laws in place and CXC encourages the proper use of personal information. Candidates must understand, share and be cognisant of the proper use of personal identification on the web.
“The designing and development of assessments in your own space cannot be business as usual. You can’t just give a candidate a question, they can go home and just give a response from AI. Let’s understand it will require higher-order thinking for performance-based type assessments.”
She said CXC would assist in evaluating assessment processes and products and maintaining measurement principles in item generation and assessment development.
Manning said CXC had been talking to parents and students across the region about what was required during the process. She said there would be several sensitisation sessions to ensure everyone was comfortable.
“Our policy protects candidates, parents and teachers as it shows they need to do things differently. Anyone can go on the computer and come up with anything, but then to evaluate those competencies, we have to say we’re using a performance base.
"How do you literally show/present to me what is required? We have to do things differently and this provides guides and standards for schools, teachers, students and their parents to use.”
Asked how AI could be incorporated in teaching practice, deputy CEO Eduardo Ali said, “We’re working with a more personalised learning model that allows us to use technology, most notably AI, to customise personal instruction to create lesson plans for students in the classroom space. So every teacher will have access to AI to use it for their lesson plans, which will be individual but cohort-based, so every learner does not leave the experience of learning without having a targeted approach, catering to their own personal learning needs.
“We want to ensure that students’ capability to use Gen AI is improved, as the sophistication of AI is increasing daily. We also want to train teachers in how to use Gen AI in teaching and learning and formative assessment.”
Manning said the standard treats with how students are supposed to cite their use of AI, originality, and use of technology.
“We will also be providing an AI assessment scale that tells you the impact on the candidate’s score or grade, the fact that you get no grade because you did not provide the citing, as is currently a requirement for us, whether you are citing a human or whether you’re citing t
