Rethinking Assessment in the Age of ChatGPT: Grounding Artificial Intelligence Through Lacanian Psychoanalysis

PRESENTER: Dr Joeri Mol

CO-AUTHOR: 
Gayan Alahapperuma Arachchige (The University of Melbourne)

TOPIC: Rethinking Assessment in the Age of ChatGPT: Grounding Artificial Intelligence Through Lacanian Psychoanalysis

DATE: Friday, 15 August 2025
TIME: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM

Abstract:

In the wake of the arrival of ChatGPT, academic institutions have been scrambling to come to terms with the pedagogical challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence. Since it offers students a tool that can almost instantly generate ‘original’ assignments that are likely to escape the scrutiny of existing plagiarism detection technologies (Chaka, 2023), it is perhaps unsurprising that the key focus of academic institutions has been on curtailing its adverse effect on assessment. Business schools are no exception: all economic disciplines, but particularly those that extensively make use text-based assessment like organization and management theory, have been significantly affected (Krammer, 2023; Lindebaum & Ramirez, 2024; Valcea, Hamdani, & Wang, 2024). In response, universities have urgently trying to find a solution to the seemingly intractable problem posed by generative AI, centering around two competing policies: 1) a ‘restrictive’ approach that seeks to repair the integrity of student assessment through the provision of educative guidelines on academic misconduct combined with enhanced technological capabilities to monitor, control, and police students’ misuse of generative AI (Bin-Nashwan, Sadallah, & Bouteraa, 2023; Cotton, Cotton, & Shipway, 2024; Rudolph, Tan, & Tan, 2023; Susnjak & McIntosh, 2024), and 2) an ‘accommodative’ approach that encourages students to make use of generative AI allowing them to embark upon the new opportunities afforded by this groundbreaking technology (Grassini, 2023; Imran & Almusharraf, 2023; McMurtrie, 2022; Zhang & Aslan, 2021).

However, in this paper we argue that this debate eschews the fundamental quandary presented by generative AI, namely: if what passes for adequate knowledge can be created at the press of a button, what does that say about that state of knowledge and education per se? If most knowledge a university provides is at the fingertips of anyone using generative AI, what is the added value of doing an academic degree in the first place?

In contradistinction, we propose a third approach to engage with the advent of generative AI in tertiary education, namely the ‘inquisitive approach’, foregrounding the importance of the student-educator relationship in the production and acquisition of knowledge. In doing so, we advance a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework to bring into sharp relief how generative AI has fundamentally changed our relationship with knowledge, not just the way that we assess it but also how we, as educators, are fundamentally beholden to it. We will make use of Lacan’s (1969-1970) four discourses to interrogate the ways in which generative AI has reshaped the subject positions of both students and educators alike. In doing so, we critically examine current approaches (i.e. ‘restrictive’ and ‘accommodative’) aiming to mitigate the effect of generative AI on assessment, with a special reference to management education. Ultimately this leads us to propose a pedagogy that not only takes into full consideration the way that AI has uprooted the relationship between students and educators but also identify those types of assessment that are profoundly generative in nature, but this time for humans rather than bots.