Interviews As An Authentic Form Of Assessment And Learning In The Era Of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Before the arrival of modern universities, education in the professional disciplines such as civil engineering was rooted in practical experiences undertaken under the guidance of a master builder or engineers in the guilds. The institutional approach only became formalised in the 18th century with universities largely taking over civil engineering education by the late nineteen century. At this time universities adopted assessment techniques such as oral examinations, fieldwork assessments, drafting assessments and defending project work before a panel of professors or professional engineers. In the modern university, written exams and projects have become the dominant tools for evaluating learning. The integrity of these affordances, particularly when executed outside a proctored environment, is now challenged by the use of AI technology. This paper summarises how incorporating oral defence (aka interviews) as an assessment tool helps differentiate individual student performance and protects the integrity of the learning environment. The interview also prepares student engineers for life in the profession. Since its launch in 2008, the civil engineering programme at the University of Limerick (Ireland) employs interviews as an assessment tool throughout its undergraduate programme. The authors have found interviews to be a robust and reliable means of i) evaluating student learning and ii) decerning if students have undertaken the necessary research to gain understanding. This paper outlines how interviews are used to assess individual student’s understanding of project work when undertaken as part of a team-based exercise. The paper also describes how the efficiency of the interview process can be retained for large class sizes by making small adjustments to adapt the interview methodology for group interviews. Finally, by scheduling the interviews in advance of the final examination allows students to fill gaps in their knowledge prior to the examination. The latter is a popular decision confirmed by graduate feedback collected over the first decade of programme graduates.