Several Australian universities allow staff to use AI in marking assessments and providing students with feedback, according to a report. The practice has sparked debate among academics, with some viewing it as a welcome aid for overworked staff and others as a risky shortcut.
Armin Alimardani, a senior lecturer in law and technology at Western Sydney University (WSU), has been studying and experimenting with AI for years. Speaking from Palermo, Italy, where he is attending university workshops on the technology, he said colleagues have asked him if AI could help lighten the burden of grading. Alimardani finds this talk "extremely concerning".
Concerns over higher education collapse
"We've got to be really careful where we are stepping here," he said. "Because I think there's always a risk, at the moment, for higher education to collapse."
WSU is among several Australian universities that allow staff to use AI in marking assessments and giving students feedback. Critics, including Alimardani, say such use risks replacing human academics with algorithms and could create a "slop-cycle", where students submit AI-generated assignments that academics mark with AI.
"Students are already financially struggling," Alimardani said. "If they are not receiving proper feedback, if they feel like their degree is not as meaningful for employers and if they think that having a university degree doesn't help them that much with guaranteeing a job – why would they come to university, really?"
Mixed policies across universities
The University of Newcastle, Deakin University, RMIT in Victoria, and the University of Adelaide all give similar allowances to WSU, though it is a qualified green light. Newcastle gives students the right to opt out, and Deakin says staff can use AI to "improve efficiency and support assessment and administrative activities" but not "assign grades".
A WSU spokesperson said the university took "a human-centred approach to generative AI use in assessment" in which "the awarding of marks, grades and feedback must also always be the responsibility of academic staff". The spokesperson added: "Academic staff may use AI tools to support certain aspects of assessment and feedback, however responsibility for academic judgment must always remain with university teaching staff."
Alimardani acknowledges AI has potential to improve marking quality by acting as a "second pair of eyes", and he is working on models to pick out inconsistencies in human assessment. He notes many university staff are overworked to "breaking point", with marking taking up a large portion of their time.
However, he says claims of AI's potential benefit are largely untested, and the risk is so great as to require a "really slow" evaluation. He warns of "verification drift", where after a few AI-generated assessments appear fine, the human overseeing them stops being vigilant, and AI hallucinations slip through as facts.
Some universities hold back
Several high-ranking universities, including the University of NSW, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Sydney, draw the line at using generative AI in marking, despite allowing it in other classroom aspects.
Others are still considering the matter. A Monash spokesperson said "at this time, AI is not used in the marking process", but the university was "transforming assessment through a programmatic approach" in which "AI is integrated into teaching and assessment to support students' learning". Wollongong and James Cook universities responded similarly. A University of Queensland spokesperson said academics are "required to confirm that all specified learning outcomes are achieved and that grades awarded reflect the level of student attainment", adding that "UQ maintains an expectation that academics assess their students' work and is actively developing policies to maintain this expectation in the age of AI".
The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) advised staff in late August of its "assessment uplift project", described in an email as "a whole-of-university initiative to transform QUT's assessment ecosystem so that assessment remains authentic, trusted, scalable and future-focused in an increasingly AI-enabled learning environment". The email said the project "is currently progressing through initiation, with broad consultation underway to understand current experiences, challenges, and opportunities across the assessment lifecycle".
One QUT academic, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the reaction among staff was one of "widespread concern". Though "worryingly vague", the academic said the email "certainly seems to be flagging that we will use less human marking if we can". They said sessional academics often rely on marking as a primary source of income in an already precarious line of work: "People are concerned their job might be made redundant."
Many staff are unconvinced AI could reliably assess work, given the poor quality of AI-generated assignments they see students trying to pass off as their own. "We are telling students all the time that there are integrity issues with their use of AI in assessment," the academic said. "What message does it send if we then say: but we are going to use it to mark you?"
QUT student Alex Cameron, an editor at the university's Glass Magazine, said the message would be clear: "At that point, we might as well just have AI everything. Just get our degrees through AI and have AI write our assignments." Cameron said he "wouldn't pay $1000" for a degree marked with AI and "would be absolutely bloody incensed". "We like to do human writing, we like to have humans look at it – and we like to get feedback from humans," he said.
