The first question of the 2030 Boyer Report asks, “Will we prioritize transformative education for life, work, and citizenship in the age of daunting challenges in need of world-embracing solutions?” (p. 3). Trevett-Smith et al.’s (2026) contribution to the new The Equity-Excellence Imperative in Action notes that assessment is a key step to any responses to this provocation. What are new ways to think about curricular assessment and academic integrity in the age of AI — certainly a "daunting challenge" if there was one?
On May 19, 2026, Professor Adam Bridgeman (Pro-Vice Chancellor for Teaching and Learning) and Professor Mary Wright presented the “two lane model,” an institution-wide schema for thinking about assessment of student learning, now adopted across all of the University of Sydney, much of Australia and New Zealand, and some of the UK. Secure assessments, which are in-person tasks such as exams or internships, are designed to offer assurance of learning and restrict or prohibit AI. Open assessments, such as take-home exams or papers, are designed as assessment for learning, and a student’s AI usage cannot be controlled. This institution-wide approach offers individual instructors a refreshing opportunity to avoid a plethora of academic integrity cases, and it gives the institution a mechanism to assure the public that students are meeting key institutional learning outcomes. The session will describe the change process involved in rewriting policies, convincing skeptical colleagues, and categorizing 30K+ assessments, as well as the challenges and complexities of this process (e.g., how can writing, a key university learning outcome, be secured?). Discussion will focus on challenges to and affordances of adapting the system to a US context.