ROSEAU, Dominica (CMC) — The Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) Monday said it has embraced artificial intelligence (AI) and is now creating the environment for academic integrity and safeguarding against “intellectual laziness”.

CXC’s Registrar and Chief Executive Officer, Dr Wayne Wesley, said AI is something of interest to the region’s premier examination body, adding “in fact we have embraced artificial intelligence”.

“We believe…what we need to do is to create the environment with the requisite safeguards, academic integrity, safeguarding against what I call intellectual laziness. In other words you want persons to develop cognitively,” he said in an interview on the state-owned DBS Radio.

“We want to also ensure that the information being created by AI is verifiable and accurate, so to prevent the hallucination that it tends to do,” said Wesley, who is leading a CXC delegation in Dominica ahead of the release of CXC examination results on Tuesday.

“What we are currently doing for the region is creating a generative regional AI policy for the secondary education system.  Some work has been done in Guyana at the tertiary level and some work has also been done at the University of the West Indies for how AI should be governed and we are now doing it for the regional secondary education system that will provide the kind of guidance and framework within which teaching, learning and assessment could be properly governed and utilised within the education system,” he added.

CXC was established in 1972 under Agreement by the participating governments in the Caribbean Community (Caricom) and provides regional and internationally recognised secondary school leaving examinations relevant to the needs of the region; assist in Common Entrance and other types of examinations.

CXC has a comprehensive suite of qualifications to meet the needs of the region namely Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), Caribbean Certificate of Secondary Level Competence (CCSLC), Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ), Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) and the CXC Associate Degree (CXC-AD).

CXC Director of Operations, Examination Services, Dr Nicole Manning told radio listeners on the issue of AI, that regional examination body is developing candidates not only academically “but, collaboratively, with the Ministry of  Education, we are looking for  candidates to ensure that integrity and ethics is a part of the vein of the candidate and how  they operate”.

She said CXC is seeking to develop critical thinking rather than having students regurgitating information in exams.

“So the use of AI is not the issue, it is the facilitation of the assessment. We already have in some of our subjects where in terms of the presentation a candidate has to literally provide the information and they are questioned by a panel or otherwise.

“That’s where we are seeing to go. In other words we are not asking them to just present information, we are trying to help them in the learning process through various assessment strategies utilise those skills…”

She said because of the ethical and integrity components “we have our systems and so plagiarism is still a big thing for us, we want to encourage the candidates to be honest in terms of the reporting of the source of work because you want to give credit where credit is due”.

“But at the same time, what CXC wants to do is to create those policies to facilitate the learning and assessment that happens within the environment, as well as concomitantly with that you have the actual creation of the candidate who  are now operating as innovative being.

“So it is a combination of things that we want to achieve,” Manning said, adding “it will be a learning process for the candidate, how they manage themselves and how they manage the whole process of the utilisation of AI and what we currently have in terms of the not …plagiarising and how we help them to do that”.