General Research Fund (GRF): Examining and redesigning assessment tasks challenged by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to uphold academic integrity and support learning (2025-27)

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) poses significant challenges to assessments in higher education. Many existing assessment tasks are ill-equipped to cope with these challenges. This proposed study aims to examine undergraduates’ interactions with GenAI in four frequently adopted assessment tasks (i.e. reflective paper, presentation, project report, and research proposal) and leverage the findings to redesign the assessment tasks to uphold academic integrity with honesty in academic practices and to support students in achieving their learning outcomes.
GenAI challenges academic integrity and student learning with its ability to generate human-like arguments based on user prompts. Although emerging research has examined GenAI’s ability to pass knowledge-based examinations, few empirical studies have considered students’ interactions with GenAI in continuous assessments. It remains unclear whether and how students use GenAI to complete continuous assessment tasks, whether these interactions violate academic integrity, and, most importantly, what assessment designs are more effective in supporting academic integrity and learning.