Beyond Multiple Choice Session 7: From Memorization to Judgment: Redesigning Professional Certification in the Age of AI

The Future-Ready Assessment Ecosystem: Society

Assessment plays a vital role beyond education, helping to connect people with opportunities, support workforce development and build confidence in skills and credentials. As industries evolve and workforce needs change, assessment must continue to adapt.

This week explores the wider societal impact of assessment, examining skills gaps, digital credentialing, workforce development and the future of AI-enabled skills. Through expert discussion and practical examples, sessions will consider how assessment can strengthen trust, support economic growth and help individuals succeed throughout their careers.

About this session

Professional certification depends on trust. Employers, regulators, professions and the public must believe that a credential represents genuine capability. Yet many certification programmes still rely heavily on recall and recognition through fixed-response examinations. Generative AI has exposed the limits of that model. When candidates can retrieve, compare and synthesise knowledge instantly, selecting the “best” answer is no longer sufficient evidence that they can apply knowledge responsibly.

Banning AI, expanding remote surveillance or making conventional exams longer may protect an existing format without strengthening the competence signal. This session proposes a different response: redesign assessment around the human capabilities that become more valuable when information is abundant.

Using examples from professional certification, Olivier Lazar will explore how scenario-based tasks, constructed responses, iterative questioning, oral defence and source evaluation can reveal reasoning, judgment, adaptability and ownership. He will show how assessment can distinguish between knowing an   answer, applying a framework and making a defensible decision under ambiguity.

The session will also consider the appropriate role of AI. AI can support scenario variation, formative feedback and structured review of open-ended evidence, but only with human oversight and controls for explainability,   fairness, auditability and appeal. The goal is not to abandon reliability, validity or expert judgment, but to direct them toward richer evidence of competence.

Participants will leave with a practical framework for examining what their credentials currently prove, identifying where recall-heavy methods are weakest and planning a proportionate transition toward assessment that better reflects professional practice.