Redesign the Term 3 assessment for a class with AI

Redesign the Term 3 assessment for a class with AI

The assessment you are drafting this weekend for Week 5 or 6 will be sat by a class that has AI on every phone in the room and on every laptop at home. The staffroom conversation for two years has been about whether to allow it, whether to detect it, and whether the school policy is coherent enough to enforce. That conversation is over. In 2026 the useful question is different. Given that every student in your class has capable AI in their pocket, and given that pretending they do not is a way to write a task that measures the quality of the AI, not the student, what does the task need to look like? Not "harder", not "AI-proof" (which is not a real thing), not "in-class only" as a default, but structurally designed so the thinking the task rewards is thinking a student cannot outsource. This is the Saturday-morning prompt for that redesign. Feed it the draft. It will not write the task for you. It will show you where the current draft is measuring the AI, and it will give you the specific structural moves that put the student back at the centre of what is being assessed.

The prompt

You are a senior [SUBJECT] teacher and assessment designer in an Australian [PRIMARY / SECONDARY / TERTIARY] school. You have written and moderated enough assessment tasks to know the difference between a task that measures a student and a task that measures the resources the student had access to. You accept, as a starting assumption, that every student in the room has capable AI on their phone and their laptop, and that a task which can be completed by pasting the brief into an AI is a task that measures the AI, not the student. You do not moralise about student use of AI. You redesign the task so that AI use is either irrelevant to what is being assessed, or structurally required to be visible and defensible.

I have a draft assessment task for [YEAR LEVEL] [SUBJECT AND UNIT], due to be sat in Week [N] of Term 3. I need you to help me rebuild it, this weekend, before I share the brief with the class.

CONTEXT
- Year level: [YEAR LEVEL]
- Subject and unit: [e.g. Year 10 Humanities, unit on modern Australian history from 1901 to 1945]
- Curriculum frame: ACARA v9.0 [PASTE the specific content descriptor or achievement standard], or the state study design line (VCE Study Design outcome, NSW syllabus outcome, QCAA subject matter)
- The task type: [e.g. "in-class essay", "take-home research report", "oral presentation with slide deck", "practical investigation with written report", "portfolio", "SAC"]
- Weighting toward the final grade: [e.g. "20 percent of the school-based mark for the unit", or "one of four Term 3 tasks"]
- Conditions currently on the task: [e.g. "written at home over two weeks, 1000 words, submitted through the school LMS with Turnitin"]
- The one thing this task is really assessing, in one sentence: [not what the rubric says. What you would tell a colleague after two wines. E.g. "whether students can hold a historical argument across three sources", or "whether students can transfer the quadratic method to an unfamiliar context"]
- What percentage of your current class you would guess is already using AI on take-home work in this subject, honestly: [ROUGH ESTIMATE, e.g. "most of the top band, half the middle, some of the lower"]
- School policy on AI use in assessment, if you know it: [ONE LINE, e.g. "permitted for planning and brainstorming, not permitted for drafting, must be declared", or "not addressed"]

THE DRAFT TASK
Paste the full task brief as students would see it, including the stimulus, the question or prompt, the conditions, the rubric or marking guide, and any scaffolding sheet. Do not paraphrase. If the rubric is on a separate document, paste it too.

[PASTE THE DRAFT HERE]

PRODUCE FIVE SECTIONS, IN THIS EXACT ORDER. NO PADDING. NO FLATTERING PRE-AMBLE ("thoughtful draft", "rich task"). START WITH SECTION 1.

SECTION 1. THE THREAT MAP
A short table, one row per component of the task, showing what an AI could do for the student on this draft as written. Three columns.
- COLUMN 1. THE COMPONENT (e.g. "the introduction paragraph", "the source analysis", "the counter-argument", "the annotated bibliography", "the slide deck", "the diagram", "the reflection at the end").
- COLUMN 2. WHAT AN AI COULD DO FOR THE STUDENT ON THIS COMPONENT AS WRITTEN, in one line. Be specific and honest. Not "generate content", but "produce a passable Band 4 response with no source engagement in 45 seconds from just the question stem".
- COLUMN 3. WHAT THIS COMPONENT IS SUPPOSED TO BE MEASURING, according to the rubric. Name the criterion.

Then one paragraph underneath: which components are, in your reading, currently measuring the AI more than the student. Do not soften. If the whole task is in that category, say so.

SECTION 2. THE STRUCTURAL REDESIGN
Four to six specific structural moves that shift the task from "measures the AI" to "measures the student". These are STRUCTURAL, not moralising. Not "remind students that AI use is not permitted". Structural moves are moves that change WHAT is assessed, WHERE it is done, WHEN it is checked, or HOW the evidence of thinking is captured. Examples of the level you should aim for:
- "Move the source-selection step from home to a 20-minute in-class block on Day 1. Every student picks their three primary sources in the room, with the printed source pack in front of them, and hands in a one-paragraph rationale for their selection at the end of the block. This paragraph becomes an anchor the take-home draft has to be consistent with."
- "Replace the standalone written response with a written response plus a 3-minute unseen oral defence in Week 6. Students answer two questions the teacher picks at random from a public bank of ten, on their own written response. If the student cannot defend their own paragraph, the assessment mark reflects the defended parts, not the paragraph."
- "Change the question from 'write an essay on X' to 'compare your Week 1 in-class paragraph on X with your final draft, and account for the changes'. The task is now about the trajectory of the student's own thinking, which the AI does not have access to."
- "Add a mandatory in-class annotation session in Week 4 where students annotate their own draft against the rubric, in a different pen, on paper. The annotation is submitted with the final piece and is assessed."

For each move you propose:
- STATE THE MOVE in one sentence.
- STATE WHAT IT SHIFTS. Which rubric criterion is now genuinely being measured that was previously being outsourced.
- STATE THE COST. Every structural move costs something (teacher time, class time, moderation complexity, LMS complications). Name it honestly. A move that costs nothing is either too small to matter or the honest cost has been hidden from you.
- STATE THE MINIMUM VERSION. If I only have appetite for one part of the move this term (rather than the full redesign), which part. Some structural moves are all-or-nothing; some can be trialled in a smaller form.

SECTION 3. THE PROCESS EVIDENCE BLOCK
A short block on what OBSERVABLE PROCESS ARTEFACTS the redesigned task should generate, so that at moderation and at appeal the student's work is visible as their work. Not "students should demonstrate their process". The artefacts. Specific examples:
- "The in-class planning sheet from Day 1, submitted with the final piece, in the student's handwriting or in a locked-editor Google Doc with revision history."
- "The revision history of the Google Doc, exported as a PDF, showing continuous drafting rather than a single paste event at 11.47pm on the day before."
- "The three annotated sources in the student's own hand, submitted with the final piece."
- "The 3-minute oral defence recording, or the teacher's notes from it, held on the school system."
- "A short reflection on 'what the AI helped me with, and what I changed after it', 100 words, submitted with the piece, treated as data, not confession."

For each artefact:
- Say what it evidences.
- Say what it does NOT evidence (do not overclaim; a revision history does not prove the student wrote it, only that the drafting was distributed in time).
- Say where it lives (student's book, school LMS, teacher's file, moderation folder).

The point of Section 3 is that a redesigned task without process evidence is still a mark on a piece of paper that could have been made by anyone. The evidence is what turns it into an assessment.

SECTION 4. THE AI-USE DECLARATION
The task should include a mandatory AI-use declaration from the student, submitted with the piece. NOT as confession, NOT as a "gotcha", and NOT as the assessment. As data. Draft the declaration for me, in the register of a Year [X] student, using this shape:
- What I used (name the tool: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, the school-provided model, none).
- What I used it for, in three or four short bullets, using verbs the student will actually recognise: brainstormed, checked spelling, asked for feedback on a paragraph, generated an initial outline, generated the final piece and edited it.
- What I did with the output. This is the interesting bullet. "I used the outline as-is." vs. "I threw the outline out and wrote my own." vs. "I merged its ideas with mine." tells the teacher what happened.
- The one prompt I am most glad I asked. This is optional but rewarded. It signals that the student is developing prompt fluency, which is a skill the school will want to name.
- The one prompt I now think was a mistake. Also optional. Also rewarded. It signals metacognition.

Draft this declaration as a form the student fills in on submission, three-quarters of a page, in student-friendly language. Include a two-line note to the teacher about how to READ this declaration (what strong use looks like, what weak use looks like, what to flag). Do NOT include a line that says "I confirm I did not use AI". That line is unenforceable and turns the declaration into a lie test rather than a data source.

SECTION 5. THE HONEST NOTES
Three to five short bullets I need before I share the redesigned brief with the class.
- Any structural move you proposed that would, in your judgement, be REJECTED by my head of learning area, my curriculum leader, or the state study design, and why. Name the political cost, not just the pedagogical one. Some moves are right and unrunnable this year.
- Any move that would ADVANTAGE students with more support at home (in-class oral defence advantages the confident speaker, take-home process journals advantage the student with a study desk) and how to mitigate.
- Any move that requires TECHNOLOGY OR SUPERVISION the school does not have (a supervised in-class block with a laptop lockdown may need infrastructure the school has not resourced). Do not propose it as if the resource is there.
- If the honest answer is that the task, in its current form, cannot be salvaged and needs to be a different TASK TYPE for what it is trying to measure (e.g. this is an essay when it should be an oral, or a written report when it should be a viva), say so plainly. That is a bigger conversation than one weekend, but the weekend is the right time to notice it.
- If the redesigned task is going to require a class-facing script in the first lesson back that names the change and explains it in the register a Year [X] student will accept, say so and give me the three sentences.

RULES
- Australian English throughout. Year 10, not 10th grade. Term 3, not Q3. Australian assessment vocabulary. VCE, HSC, ATAR, SAC, moderation, AISNSW, DET, KLA, CAT (Common Assessment Task in Victoria) where they apply.
- No em-dashes and no en-dashes anywhere. Commas and full stops only.
- Do NOT propose "make it in-class only" as the redesign. That is not a redesign. Some tasks need to be at home. The redesign is about which components sit where.
- Do NOT propose Turnitin AI detection as a structural move. It is not a structural move, it is a check that fails often and adversarially. Mention it only in Section 5, as a note on what NOT to rely on.
- Do NOT propose a redesign that punishes the honest student more than the dishonest one (mandatory 500-word "process journal" for every student, when the disengaged student will write a plausible fiction in 8 minutes and the honest student will spend 2 hours on it).
- Do NOT recommend I "have a conversation with students about academic integrity" as a substitute for a structural move. Have the conversation, and redesign the task.
- Do NOT finish with "let me know if you want me to write the full task". I will write the task myself off the redesign.

What it does well

Section 1's threat map is the block that pays for the whole prompt, because most teachers who have looked at their draft task have not sat down and asked, component by component, what an AI can do for the student on this exact draft as written. Once you have seen it laid out, half of the redesign is obvious. Section 2's insistence on four to six specific structural moves, each with a stated cost and a minimum version, is the discipline that stops the redesign becoming a wish list of things you would do if you had a different school and a different year level. Section 3's process evidence block is the part most redesign conversations skip; a redesigned task without observable artefacts is a mark on a piece of paper that could still have been made by anyone, and the artefacts are what turn it into an assessment at moderation and at appeal. Section 4's AI-use declaration is the move that changes the room culture more than any other single thing, because it treats student AI use as data rather than confession, and it rewards the student who can talk about their prompts more than the student who pretends not to have used one. Section 5 is the section that keeps the redesign honest. Not every good move is a runnable move this term.

Where it falls over

The prompt is only as good as your draft task. If the paste in the "draft task" block is thin (no rubric, no stimulus, "the essay question is on the LMS"), Section 1's threat map will be thin too, and the structural moves in Section 2 will be generic. Paste the whole thing, including the rubric and the scaffolding sheet, or the redesign will read as advice for a task the model has imagined rather than yours. Second failure: some subjects and some task types resist the redesign more than others. A VCE English essay under home conditions in 2026 is a task that has been redesigned five times in three years, and the room for further structural redesign is narrower than for a Year 8 research report where nobody has thought about it. Believe the model when it tells you a move will be rejected by your head of learning area; also verify with your head of learning area. Third failure: the AI-use declaration in Section 4 will land differently in different school cultures. In a school where students trust that the declaration is data and not a lie test, they will fill it in honestly. In a school where the declaration is used to build a case, they will lie on it, and the declaration becomes noise. The declaration is a piece of culture-building, not a piece of policy compliance, and the prompt cannot see your culture. Fourth failure: this prompt cannot rewrite the state study design. If the SAC conditions are locked by VCAA, or the QCAA subject matter locks the assessment format, the redesign lives inside the box the study design has drawn. Section 5 will flag this. It cannot fix it.

Try it like this

• For a Year 10 Humanities take-home research report on modern Australian history: the threat map in Section 1 will almost certainly show that the source analysis and the introduction are AI-completable from the question stem alone. The structural moves will likely include an in-class source selection block on Day 1, an annotated bibliography in the student's own hand, and a 3-minute oral defence in Week 6 on two questions from a public bank. The process evidence is the annotated bibliography and the revision history of the drafting doc. The AI-use declaration is the piece that shifts the room culture.
• For a VCE Unit 3 English essay on a set text: the redesign has less room, because VCAA locks a lot of the format. The move most likely to survive is the "compare your Week 1 in-class paragraph with your final draft, and account for the changes" move, plus an unseen oral defence on two paragraphs of the student's own final piece. The AI-use declaration lives inside the school-based portion, not the external exam.
• For a Year 8 Science practical investigation with a written report: the practical itself is already in-class evidence. The threat is the written report at home. The redesign moves the analysis and discussion sections to a supervised 40-minute block in Week 5, with the student's own data table in front of them, and reduces the take-home portion to the abstract and the reflection. The AI-use declaration is short, four bullets, submitted with the report.
• For a Year 5 primary journal-writing portfolio: the redesign is different in shape because primary assessment is more formative and more relational. The move is a weekly one-line teacher conference on one entry per week, in the student's own book, with the teacher's initials next to the paragraph the student read aloud. Process evidence in primary is the presence of the teacher in the record, not surveillance of the student.
• For a VET Certificate III workplace log: the threat is the reflective statements, not the log entries. The move is a 5-minute conversation with the trainer on one workplace incident per week, with the trainer's summary line signed and dated in the log. The AI-use declaration for VET should live inside the reflection section, not the logbook.
• If you only have 40 minutes this morning: run the prompt for Sections 1, 2, and 5 only. Section 1 shows you what the current draft is measuring. Section 2 gives you the moves. Section 5 tells you which moves are runnable this term. Section 3's process evidence block and Section 4's declaration can wait for the Sunday coffee, once you have picked which two moves you are actually making this Term 3.

The task on your desk this Saturday morning is either going to be sat by a class where the AI is in the room but the task pretends it is not, or by a class where the AI is in the room and the task has been built around that fact. The redesign is not about stopping the tool. It is about building an assessment that still measures the student when the tool is on the desk. Forty minutes on this prompt this weekend is the difference between a Week 5 marking pile you will trust and one you will not.