By Professor Guy Littlefair is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education and Student Experience) at UWA

Those of us working in universities are keenly aware of the double-edged sword that is AI. Although some may think we’ve been asleep at the wheel while AI has inveigled its way into all aspects of teaching and learning, the reality is quite different.

Like all organisations, tertiary institutions have been grappling for several years with how to make AI work for us while identifying and mitigating its risks.

Those who have attended higher education conferences in recent years would have noticed a growing focus on AI and how we must/need/can learn to work with it.

The University of Western Australia has taken several actions to address the issue of AI – the most significant being the decision not to use any AI detection tools.

This decision was not taken lightly or without serious consideration; we have been watching developments in this area carefully, and evidence continues to mount that such tools are unreliable, inequitable and unsuitable for high-stakes assessment decisions.

Other Australian and WA universities have taken the same view; some have opted not to employ an AI detector, while others are choosing to stop using any AI detection. Among Group of Eight universities, at least half have also decided not to use any AI detection tools.

There have been many reported cases of university students who have been accused of cheating as a result of AI getting it wrong.

Rather than engage in an adversarial and punitive process founded on a questionable academic basis, we firmly believe the key to protecting the integrity of assessments – and ultimately degrees – is to rethink how we assess students’ work.

So that’s why we are prioritising a redesign of student assessment to strengthen validity, authorship assurance and academic integrity.

We have committed resources to supporting our staff to redesign assessments. Our Learning and Assessment Design team has only been operational for six months but has already delivered assessment and feedback workshops to around 350 attendees.

Work is under way to share GenAI‑resilient assessment exemplars to teaching staff, alongside clear guidelines on the appropriate use of AI in assessments.

UWA has made the decision (somewhat unique in the Australian higher education sector) for our Learning and Assessment Design team to work side-by-side with our Academic Integrity unit.  

We’re also introducing new integrity centralisation processes and improved reporting systems this year to reduce the administrative burden on academic staff and to better align misconduct reporting with assessment redesign.

Both teams are located within our new Centre for Integrity and Impact in Teaching Excellence, which will act as a crucial support hub for staff, as well as providing support for using digital tools that are available to help address integrity concerns, such as Cadmus and Feedback Fruits.

We are undertaking comprehensive and wide-ranging reviews of the University’s assessment policy and the academic integrity policy and will share these reviews for consultation later this year.

It’s important to note that the University still makes extensive use of invigilated final exams. In 2025 for example, there were around 98,000 exam sittings by students in these secured invigilated exams, so we continue to require students to substantively demonstrate their learning in a secure environment.

We understand the challenges associated with the pervasive use of GenAI in universities are difficult to address. But we remain committed to helping our staff and students adopt this new technology in a responsible and ethical way, while retaining the non-negotiable assurance of our students’ learning.

This is an incredibly challenging time for universities, but the most significant technological disruption since the internet arrived in the 1990s requires more than a band aid fix and a ‘business-as-usual but flawed tool’ way of doing things.

Students cheating is not a new problem, but we just need to get smarter in how we deal with it. We’re fortunate to have some of the brightest minds here at UWA and are confident we can meet this challenge in the years to come.