When AI could suddenly write the essay, the first instinct everywhere was to go hunting for it. Detectors, bans, lockdown browsers. I watched capable teachers pour energy into catching a machine, and I watched the detectors flag honest work while waving the dishonest kind through. Detection was a losing game, and it was losing before AI arrived, because it inspects the product, and the product was never the evidence.
The winning game is design. Assessment survives AI when the task makes the thinking visible: the drafts, the decisions, the revisions. That is the part a learner cannot outsource without becoming the person who can do it.
Make the process the artifact
Change what you collect. Instead of only the polished output, collect the trail that produced it. An annotated draft. A short log of decisions. A defence of one choice. A revision that responds to feedback. Formative assessment research has argued for years that assessment should drive learning, not just measure it (Wiliam, 2011). Process-visible tasks do exactly that, and they happen to make the AI shortcut pointless.
Detection is a losing game. Visible process is a winning one. Design the task so the thinking has to show.
Rubrics that teach
A rubric is the most honest document in a course. It tells the learner what actually counts. When I rebuilt a course’s marking, I moved the marks onto visible process. The marker filled in a form against the learner’s drafts and decisions, not the polish of the final file. When the criteria reward reasoning and revision instead of surface, feedback lands where the learning actually happens (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).
Why AI raises the stakes
AI collapses the value of any assessment that only checks a product, and it does it overnight. That is less a crisis than a clarifier. It forces the design most assessors already knew was better. The detectors will keep improving and keep getting fooled. The design does not depend on winning that race.
The move
Take one high-stakes product task and redesign it to require a single visible piece of process. A draft, a decision, a defended choice. You will assess more honestly and spend less of your life policing.