Professor Phil Newton from the University of Swansea talks through his recent paper: Evidence of Learning Through Assessment. Protecting the Value of a Degree in the Age of AI.

Phil highlights clear and present threats to higher education by the sector’s continued use of online, unsupervised and remote assessments. This, Phil argues, is compromising universities’ ability to properly certify learning, and has the potential to erode the value of a degree.

In this conversation we talk through the six key recommendations put forward in the paper, and how they might realistically be implemented.

We discuss where change can come from, the problem of SOUR assessments, the misaligned incentives in higher education, the loss of confidence from employers, the ethical concerns around placing the burden of trust on to students, how other countries have reacted, the need for training, resource barriers, the information that should be included on degree transcripts, and many other topics.

Phil Newton teaches Neuroscience across a variety of programmes in the School. He also teaches on evidence-based education as part of the Schools online MSc in Medical Education. He came to Swansea in 2009 from the University of California at San Francisco, having completed a Ph.D in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds (2001) and a B.Sc in Biology at Aberystwyth University. He also holds an M.Sc in Medical Education from Cardiff University (2012).

LinkeIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/prof-phil-newton-21966b8a/ Web - https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/p.newton/ YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/newtonsneurosci Scholar - https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=77aJ0IMAAAAJ&view_op=list_works ORCID - https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5272-7979 Researchgate - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Phil_Newton/

Newton, P. (2026). Evidence of Learning Through Assessment. Protecting the Value of a Degree in the Age of AI. Policy Exchange. [Online]. Available at: https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/evidence-of-learning-through-assessment/.

Newton, P. M. and Draper, M. J. (2025) ‘Widespread use of summative online unsupervised remote (SOUR) examinations in UK higher education: ethical and quality assurance implications’, Quality in Higher Education, 31(1), pp. 127–141. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2025.2521174

What does a reconfigured language learning ecology look like? My guest today, Professor Pascual Pérez-Paredes, argues that AI-driven environments can “expand opportunities for language learning while creating risks related to opacity and over-reliance”.

We discuss the continued importance of studying real, attested language use through well-designed corpora, enabling evidence-based comparisons and supporting traceable, reproducible research. This, Pérez-Paredes claims, is more important than ever when unreliable, non-evidenced answers from chat bots are just a mouse click away.

We also discuss corpora in teaching, how AI can make corpus tools more user friendly, costs and local models, and the need for critical AI literacy, open-box pedagogies, and transparency amid increasing synthetic language.

Pérez-Paredes, P., Curry, N. and Aguado Jiménez, P. (2025) 'Integrating critical corpus and AI literacies in applied linguistics: a mixed-methods study', Computer Assisted Language Learning, pp. 1–27. doi: 10.1080/09588221.2025.2569351.

Pérez-Paredes, P. (2026) 'Corpus linguistics and AI in the reconfiguration of language learning ecologies', Language Teaching, pp. 1–13. doi: 10.1017/S0261444825101109

Pascual Pérez-Paredes is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at Universidad de Murcia, and former Lecturer in Research in Second Language Education at the University of Cambridge. His main research interests are the use of corpus linguistics methods in applied linguistics, corpora and digital resources in language education, learner language variation, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. He was the Overall Coordinator of the MEd Research Methods Strand at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge (2016-2019).

His most recent books are Corpus Linguistics for Language Learning Research, John Benjamins Research Methods in Applied Linguistics series with co-authors Geraldine Mark & Anne O’Keeffe; Data-driven Learning in and out of the Language Classroom, Cambridge University Press, co-authored with Prof Alex Boulton and //Corpus Linguistics for education. A guide for research// in the Routledge Corpus Linguistics series.

He is currently PI of the ERASMUS+ project “Freedom of movement at play: EU citizens’ identity and transnational discourses” (2023-2025) funded by the European Commission and PI in the Spanish Research Agency -funded project Broadening the scope of Data-driven learning: a multi-site & multi-data approach.

Twitter @perezparedes and Bluesky @perez-paredes.bsky.social

Google Scholar Profile Research Gate Profile

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2796-338X

SCOPUS: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=26038713600#

WOS: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/G-6496-2011