Using artificial intelligence in heritage master’s assessments

Artificial intelligence’s potential to disrupt ways of working, be it positively or negatively, is a growing discussion across all sectors. In higher education it has been widely reported as posing a challenge to assessment integrity, with the possibility of privacy issues and data biases. In a recent ‘Digital Assessment at UCL’ blog Dr Josep Grau-Bove from UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage has showcased his pioneering efforts in leveraging AI technology to enhance assessment practices.

In the video interview Josep explains how with the module ‘Machine Learning for Heritage’ he has incorporated the use of AI in the assessment. The students are provided with a data set and have to work through a classification problem e.g. they are giving given images of paintings by certain artists and need to develop a machine learning algorithm that classifies them according to the artist or identifies forgeries. They have been encouraged to use tools such as Chat GPT or equivalent Large Language Models (LLM) to either write part of the report, or part of the code. When they submit the assignment they need to indicate the contribution of the AI tool, the prompts used and reflect on their experience.

Josep said:

“I was interested in their opinion because my Master’s students are really bright. I know they are passionate about machine learning. And through these personal reflections, I wanted to see if they found it useful, if it helped their learning, or if they actually thought it was good for programming. I got a great diversity of responses.” “

To watch the video interview, and read more about the experience of this assessment visit the Digital Assessment at UCL blog.

Read the blog

If you are interested to find out more about Data Science education at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, discover the Data Science route of Sustainable Heritage MSc, alongside our Heritage Managementand Heritage Science routes.