The PSLE and other exams need a no-AI rule

Far from becoming outdated, supervised exams which prohibit Al use remain critical in testing whether students can think for themselves.

- Ng Chia Wee and Fung Fun Man

When students sit the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) in September, they will not have access to ChatGPT; neither will their seniors taking other national exams in the weeks ahead.

But if we are preparing students for the world where generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) will be ubiquitous, why not just give students free access to best simulate that environment?

Despite all that has been said about “it’s not whether but how” to integrate Gen AI with education, allowing it to help students answer exam questions remains intuitively absurd for most of us. Exploring the reasons behind this intuition can keep us grounded amid the relentless march of chatbots.

Saying that it is not whether AI should be involved in education, but rather how, risks sidestepping the question of whether AI should really be involved in every part of education.

It also assumes that the sudden marriage between AI and some parts of education automatically warrants us to think about how to integrate it into other parts.

In an opinion piece published in The Straits Times in July, Professor Looi Chee Kit and Dr Wong Lung Hsiang from the National Institute of Education called for our exams to catch up with the future. “The question is no longer whether AI belongs in assessment, but how to design assessments that teach and test what truly matters in an Al-augmented world,” they wrote.

However, consider the following involving other tools: PSLE students can only use the calculator in one of two mathematics papers; across PSLE to A Levels, electronic dictionaries can only be used for selected tasks in mother tongue examinations; and English Language and General Paper remain closed-book exams, despite Google searches being a part of daily life. At the university, semi-closed-book exams (where students can bring in some notes but cannot use the internet) are a common mode of assessment.