Teaching & Learning Tip
By Scott Seagle
Without question, GenAI has redrawn the boundaries of academic assessment. When a student can produce a “competent” essay in minutes, the traditional writing assignment raises uncomfortable questions, not only about student integrity, but also about what we were measuring in the first place.
Show Your Work: Assessment in the Age of AI (2026), by Kevin Yee, Laurie Uttich, Elizabeth Giltner, and Anastasia Bojanowski, address those questions directly. Rather than staking out a position on whether AI belongs in the classroom, the book offers something more useful: a flexible framework that meets faculty where they are.
The authors organize their guidance around three approaches. The first helps faculty integrate AI deliberately as a learning tool, making the collaboration itself part of the assignment. Examples include using AI to generate ideas for a project, critique a draft, compare alternative solutions, or support research and revision while requiring students to document and evaluate the AI’s contributions. The second offers strategies for designing work that students complete without AI; not by prohibition alone, but by building assignments where the human process is visible and essential. Examples include scaffolded projects with checkpoint submissions, annotated notes and research logs, in-class writing activities, and drafts that reveal the evolution of a student’s thinking over time. The third identifies alternative assessment formats that sidestep AI’s capabilities altogether, emphasizing skills that are harder to automate: oral defense, real-time problem solving, and reflective practice.
The authors outline three approaches to AI in coursework:
1. Integrate AI as a learning tool. Make the collaboration part of the assignment, such as using AI to brainstorm, critique drafts, compare solutions, or support research, while requiring students to document and evaluate what the AI contributes.
2. Design work completed without AI. Rather than relying on prohibition, build assignments that make the human process visible and essential, such as scaffolded projects with checkpoints, annotated notes and research logs, in-class writing, and drafts that show how a student’s thinking evolves.
3. Use alternative assessments. Choose formats that emphasize skills harder to automate, such as oral defenses, real-time problem solving, and reflective practice.
Across all three approaches, the book provides more than 50 concrete strategies that faculty can adapt to their own disciplines and course contexts. The emphasis throughout is on building the skills that matter most – critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, and ethical reasoning – regardless of which approach a given instructor chooses.
One of the book’s more useful features is that it requires no particular stance on AI. Faculty who find generative tools genuinely valuable in their fields, those who have serious reservations, and those still working out their position will all find relevant material here.
Show Your Work is available under a Creative Commons license, making it freely accessible. For faculty navigating one of the more consequential shifts in higher education in recent memory, it is a practical and timely starting point.