Multidimensional assessment and generative artificial intelligence: repercussions for curriculum and management in higher education

Abstract

The incorporation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into higher education has been treated predominantly as a matter of academic integrity, to be contained through rules and detection mechanisms. This article proposes a different reading: GenAI renders visible the exhaustion of an assessment model centred on final products, whose fragility predates the technology. Drawing on the concept of multidimensional assessment, grounded in complex thought and in the notion of pertinent knowledge, the study analyses the impacts of this reconfiguration on the curriculum and on the academic management of institutions whose core purpose is human formation. The article is a theoretical essay supported by a literature review, with a corpus retrieved through Google Scholar searches, triangulated with an AI-assisted search tool, limited to the past five years and deliberately complemented with recent Latin American and Lusophone scholarship. The study argues that GenAI confirms assessment as a process, by exposing the insufficiency of the product as evidence of learning, while simultaneously introducing the risk of delegation of cognitive work. At the curricular level, the results indicate the repositioning of disciplinary knowledge as a condition for critical judgement and the explicit teaching of the formative process, with products re-embedded in dialogic forms of verification. At the level of management, they indicate a shift from surveillance towards the governance of the conditions of formation. Assessment, curriculum and management thus constitute dimensions of a single institutional and formative movement.