Deputy Premier and Minister for Education and Early Learning Prue Car has asked the NSW Education Standards Authority to urgently examine measures to protect student learning and maintain the integrity of the Higher School Certificate as the use of artificial intelligence accelerates in schools.
As an immediate step, she has asked NESA to consider a moratorium on unsupervised, take-home assessment tasks while a broader review is undertaken into AI’s impact on student learning and assessment.
The review will examine the growing evidence of AI’s effect on students’ cognitive development and consider how assessment methods, including major projects and creative works, can better safeguard authentic student work.
NESA has also been asked to develop a common approach for schools and teachers to help them identify inappropriate AI use in student assessments.
Half of a student’s HSC result is based on school-based assessment, some of which is currently completed outside the classroom, increasing the importance of ensuring assessment remains a genuine measure of student learning.
Subject to NESA’s advice, any interim changes would be implemented by the beginning of Term 4 this year, providing the HSC Class of 2027, their schools, and parents with certainty as their final year of school begins.
It is expected that some tasks, like major art or design and technology projects, would be exempt from such a ban, with the Deputy Premier expecting more subject-specific advice for incoming HSC students.
Deputy Premier of New South Wales and Minister for Education and Early Learning Prue Car said:
“Artificial intelligence has enormous potential to support teaching and learning, but it should never replace the thinking, creativity, and hard work that education is designed to develop.
“The purpose of schooling extends beyond producing an assessment task. It is to build knowledge, judgement, resilience, and critical thinking over time. If students rely on AI to bypass that learning process, we risk undermining both their education and the integrity of the HSC.
“We need to act now as the evidence continues to emerge. It is better to put sensible safeguards in place while we fully understand AI’s long-term impact on student learning.
“Technology should enhance education, not diminish it. Parents deserve confidence that HSC results reflect a student’s own knowledge, effort and achievement.
“The settings for the HSC have an impact on learning throughout high school. Where teachers and students know they face an offline environment in final exams, that will likely impact the way they prepare for those exams. If you want to run a marathon, you don’t practice on a computer. You don’t build grey matter by getting a computer to do the thinking for you.”
