Presumption of guilt? AI chatbots and the role of affirmation vivas in assessing academic integrity

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the proliferation of conversational agents have brought transformative changes in education but pose challenges in ensuring the academic integrity of assessments. This article proposes ‘affirmation vivas’ as a potent response to reasonable doubts about the authorship of assessed student work. It draws on a case-study of the first affirmation viva conducted at the University of Glasgow, conducted after ChatGPT “confessed” to generating part of a student dissertation. During the viva, while acknowledging experimenting with AI chatbots, the student successfully demonstrated understanding and ownership of their work. The article reviews practical and ethical issues involved in responding to suspected AI misuse and develops a principled framework for affirmation vivas. We conceptualise these vivas as a means of affirming student understanding rather than detecting AI misuse or presuming misconduct. We derive five principles for their fair and proportionate implementation, including a high threshold for convening them, a presumption of innocence throughout the process and for marking to take place only after the viva, avoiding biases that derive from assuming a student’s guilt.