Beyond Ban or Embrace: Co-constructing Responsible GenAI Use in Communication-related Assessments

The rapid integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into higher education presents both opportunities and challenges for ethical, discipline-appropriate, and sustainable use in student assessments. Aiming at promoting responsible and appropriate GenAI use, this presentation outlines the Communication-intensive Courses (CiC) approach to GenAi literacy. Specifically, it explores the creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) guidelines for assessments across four distinct literacies: writing, speaking, visual literacy, and digital literacy.

Grounded in a modified version of Jisc’s (2017) Digital Capability Framework and Lalonde’s (2019) concept of digital fluency, this CiC approach emphasizes both the acquisition of technical skills and the metacognitive ability to transfer these skills across contexts to make informed, nuanced decisions about technology use. This approach integrates GenAI into multi-stages (e.g., planning, investigating, and revision) and guide students to innovatively co-construct with GenAI by suggesting when and how to use GenAI, therefore, fostering shared responsibility, critical reflection, and discipline-specific adaptation.

Specifically, for writing assessments, teachers encourage students to use GenAI for brainstorming, structuring, language refinement, and critical content review, while preserving originality in reflective and experiential components. For speaking assessments, teachers guide students to leverage GenAI for speech outlining, audience analysis, and rehearsal feedback, with emphasis on retaining authentic voice, tone, and delivery style. For visual assessments, teachers inform students to use GenAI tools for idea generation, layout prototyping, and media enhancement, while ensuring compliance with ethical image creation, copyright, and accessibility standards. For digital assessments, teachers encourage students to apply GenAI for information synthesis, data analysis, and multimodal content creation, with explicit transparency and attribution of AI assistance.

Students are encouraged to declare their use of GenAI at each stage of the assessment process. This ethical and responsible co-construction with GenAI benefits both students (e.g., supportive ethical decision-making, enhanced GenAI literacy) and teachers (e.g., adaptable teaching strategies, assessment design considerations, balance academic integrity, etc.). This AI guideline for assessment also provides insights for AI-supported education.