Designing assessments with AI

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  Bookings close 2 Jun 2025 at 11am (UK time)

Workshop overview

AI has rapidly become one of the most prominent and widely discussed technologies in educational assessment. Over 70% of assessment professionals in our customer survey (October 2024) said they wanted to learn more about the topic.

As AI becomes more widely used across different industries, assessment professionals are asking:

• Should I use AI in assessments?
• How can I use it effectively and safely?
• What are the potential risks and benefits?

A common misconception is that AI is designed to replace human assessment specialists. In reality, it is a tool that has the potential to enhance your work—helping to streamline processes, standardise question generation, and create different question types—without replacing expert judgement.

If you're considering using AI in assessment design, you may be wondering:

• Will it save me time and resources?
• What about security and privacy risks?
• Is AI-generated content biased?

This interactive series of three workshops will provide you with a solid foundation in using AI for item generation and assessment design from Cambridge expert, Niall McNulty. The sessions focus on core principles applicable to any large language model (LLM) and offer practical skills to help you maximise AI’s potential while ensuring quality and fairness.

Whereas the workshop content will focus on formative assessment, the concepts and ideas can be scaled to suit summative assessments. Each session builds on the previous one, incorporating hands-on learning, reflection, and real-world application.

There is also an opportunity to complete an optional end-of-course project. This will give you a chance to apply your learning from the workshop series to your own context. Further detail will be provided during the workshop series.

Who should attend?

This workshop series is for anyone involved in developing, reviewing, or managing formative assessments, including:

• Learning designers and instructional designers
• Online learning developers
• Teachers, lecturers, and instructors
• Publishing professionals
• Subject specialists at school and ministry level
• Assessment managers
• Subject leaders and heads of department

Whether you are new to AI or have limited experience, this series will provide the essential knowledge and skills to integrate AI into your assessment design effectively. Participants will need access to an AI tool throughout the workshop series.

Please note that, due to the relevance of this workshop’s topic, we expect it to be in high demand - book now to avoid disappointment.

Workshop dates

Course outline

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) have the potential to be an indispensable tool for educational practitioners; well-designed MCQs can be used diagnostically to differentiate students, identify student strengths and weaknesses, test the effectiveness of teaching interventions and inform your future teaching practice. MCQs also have the advantage of being able to sample large areas of content quickly and reduce overall workload.

This series of three workshops will take you through how to effectively design MCQs in order to take advantage of their strengths and avoid their weaknesses.

• Session 1: Introduction to AI in formative assessment - in this first session we will cover the understanding of how AI works and what’s involved. Topics include the overview of formative assessments, generative AI in education, AI’s role in question generation and ethical considerations.
• Session 2:  AI workflow for generating assessment content - in the second session we explore the practical aspects of generating assessment content. We will develop a structured workflow to effectively design, refine and enhance the quality of AI-generated formative assessment items.
• Session 3: Risks, quality assurance and evaluation - the final session will look at quality assurance and risk awareness. Covering identifying and mitigating AI biases, quality assurance methods and application, ensuring alignment with curriculum standards and exploring limitations and scalability challenges.

Throughout the series, you will have the opportunity to generate questions based on spreadsheet inputs, evaluate these questions, consider quality control and ethical issues, and the option of completing a formative assessment using AI.

In addition to the workshops, you will receive resources to support applying your learning to your own context and structuring your future AI needs.

Key learning outcomes

By the end of the three workshops, you will be able to:

• Understand the basics of generative AI, including models, data, and algorithms.
• Diagnose potential issues with AI-generated content, such as hallucinations.
• Analyse risks involved in using AI, including privacy, security, and bias.
• Develop new methods to generate assessment content with AI.
• Develop effective workflows for utilising AI in assessment design.
• Plan, design, and generate high-quality formative assessments, including effective distractors and feedback.