Legal Cheek reports
In a chunky paper published by the top law school, leading academics analyse AI in legal education — the main message being that they will ensure more than half of assessments they run cannot be completed with AI assistance. Two main reasons underpin the shift:
“Our task as a law faculty is to ensure that our degrees are, and continue to be, both transformative educational journeys and powerful, internationally recognised and durable signals of our students’ achievements. AI does not change the core of that”.
The paper defines a “secure assessment” as one which guarantees that “AI does not substitute for the skills or knowledge acquisition being evaluated.” This includes written and oral in-person examinations.
UCL’s regulations for all departments already prohibit AI to “create or alter content” including in assessments, like coursework, “unless explicitly authorised…for a valid pedagogical reason”. However, the move by the law school to actively “secure” assessments is a new development which will affect undergrad and postgrad studies. The law school claims shifting to 50% or more AI-proof assessments is a return to how things were done before the covid pandemic, which since made coursework more common.
During the course of their legal careers, students may find themselves working with clients or in jurisdictions which are “still at the earliest stages of the digitisation of law, let alone the use of AI” and need to be prepared for this, the law school claims. Key skills like thinking on your feet in cross-examination and learning the ethical standards for working with sensitive evidence cannot be substituted by AI use, they argue.
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