We’ve all been there. You assign an essay, and a student turns in work that’s polished and grammatically perfect. But you know in your gut they didn’t write it. Worse, you know they didn’t actually learn anything. You aren’t alone! AI didn’t invent copying. It just made it faster and harder (sometimes impossible!) to see. And if a chatbot can complete an assessment in full, that assessment needs a redesign. The good news? Designing AI-friendly assessment ideas is easier than you think.
The Shift: From Policing to AI-Friendly Assessment Design
Trying to catch AI use with detectors is a losing game. Instead, educators are rethinking assessment design altogether.
AI-friendly assessment ideas don’t eliminate AI. They leverage it—while still requiring students to prove understanding through explanation, synthesis, and personal thinking.
When assessments are designed well, AI can support learning, but it can’t do the thinking for students.
What Makes an Assessment Truly AI-Friendly?
The most effective AI-friendly assessment ideas require students to show learning in more than one way.
That might include:
- Explaining their thinking out loud
- Showing their process visually
- Making personal or local connections
- Synthesizing ideas across formats
When students have to combine multiple ways of showing understanding, copy-paste shortcuts stop working and authentic learning becomes visible.
A Simple Framework
To help educators redesign what they already use, I created the Assessment Puzzle Framework, a simple approach to building assessments without starting from scratch.
For example, let’s look at a classic science assignment:
- The “AI Slop” Version: Write a 1-page essay explaining photosynthesis. (AI can do this in 30 seconds!)
- The AI-Friendly Redesign: Create a visual diagram showing photosynthesis in our local ecosystem. Use images and/or videos of local plant life. Use annotations to create a diagram. Record a voice reflection explaining how our local climate affects the process of photosynthesis differently than other climates.
What Changed? You went from assessing recall (AI’s strength) to assessing synthesis. The student still learned about photosynthesis, but now they can’t fake understanding their local climate plus their reasoning. Canva for Education, Adobe Express, and Book Creator are three tools that would be perfect to bring this assessment to life.
See how easy that was? You don’t need a total classroom overhaul. You can start by redesigning just one assessment this week.
That’s often all it takes for grading to shift from:
“Did they write this?”
to
“Wow, they really got it.”
Start with Ready-to-Use AI-Friendly Assessment Ideas
There are 24 more practical AI-friendly assessment ideas for every subject area and grade level in the free Assessment Puzzle Toolkit. In addition, the toolkit walks you through the process to create your own step by step.
Inside the toolkit, you’ll find:
- The Assessment Puzzle Framework: a simple rule that makes learning hard to fake
- Before-and-after examples assessments
- 25+ AI-friendly assessment ideas for every subject, K–12
- School-friendly tools to support assessment redesign
- And more!
Ready to stop chasing AI slop and start designing better assessments? Download the free 20 page toolkit below:
