Banning homework won't defeat AI—it will change the HSC itself

There are plans to partially switch the HSC school exam in New South Wales to an in-person format: seniors may be prohibited from completing unsupervised homework assignments. The reason isn’t that AI is useless, but rather that schools can no longer be certain who actually completed the work.

In 2025, 1,270 cases of cheating were recorded in the assignments that schools use to evaluate the HSC. Most of the violations involved homework assignments. In this situation, checking for “text generated by a neural network” seems like a weak solution: a student can use AI for ideas, structure, or individual passages, and then submit a result that appears entirely plausible.

Therefore, authorities opted not for a detector but for a change in the learning environment. If half of the HSC grade continues to be based on final exams, and school assignments are completed under supervision, preparation will also begin to shift toward working without a computer. The logic is simple: you cannot reliably assess a skill if a key part of the work takes place where no one can see the process.

But there is an important trade-off here. Homework tests not only knowledge but also the ability to plan research, work with drafts, and see a large project through to completion. A ban might restore trust in the assessment, but at the same time, it could impoverish the learning process itself. Schools are already trying to maintain oversight in other ways: through interim reviews of drafts, oral explanations, research notes, and analysis of a document’s digital footprint.

The restriction appears to be temporary for now and is expected to be part of a broader review of AI’s impact on education. Exceptions are expected for subjects involving major projects, such as art and technology. At the same time, Federal Minister of Education Jason Clare believes that generative AI should still be part of the educational environment because of its ability to personalize learning. In other words, the debate isn’t about whether AI should exist in schools, but about exactly where it shouldn’t be allowed to take over a student’s intellectual work.

If you were in charge of school grading, what would you choose: a complete ban on homework, or requiring students to defend every piece of work through drafts and oral presentations? Source: Hacker News - Newest: ""AI" "LLM""