When AI could suddenly write the essay, the first instinct everywhere was to hunt 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 missing the dishonest kind. Detection was a losing game, and it was losing before AI, 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 — because that is the part a learner cannot outsource without becoming the person who can do it.
Make the process the artifact
Shift what you collect. Instead of only the polished output, collect the trail that produced it: an annotated draft, a decision log, a short defence of a choice, a revision in response to feedback. Formative assessment research has said for years that assessment should drive learning, not just measure it (Wiliam, 2011), and process-visible tasks do exactly that while quietly making 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 — a mentor marking form the marker fills against the learner’s drafts and decisions, not the polish of the final file. When the criteria reward reasoning and revision rather than surface, feedback lands where learning happens (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).
Why AI raises the stakes
AI collapses the value of any assessment that only checks a product, and it does so overnight. That is not a crisis so much as a clarifier: it forces the design most assessors already knew was better. The detectors will keep improving and keep being fooled; the design does not depend on winning that race.
The move
Take one high-stakes product task and redesign it to require one visible piece of process — a draft, a decision, a defended choice. You will assess more honestly and spend less energy policing.