Beyond AI Detection: A Decision-Making Guide for Strategic Assessment Design in Nursing Education

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) by pre- and postlicensure nursing students threatens the validity of assessments and raises concerns about competency-based evaluation and public safety.

Nurse educators lack a structured framework for evaluating the degree to which specific assessments are vulnerable to inappropriate AI use and for prioritizing where assessment design efforts are most needed.

Graduate nursing faculty used a backward design process, anchoring criterion development in known low-vulnerability assessments and refining criteria through iterative review and applied testing across multiple assessment types.

The Assessment and AI Vulnerability Decision-Making Guide for Nursing produces a total vulnerability score across 2 domains-assessment setting and assessment method-paired with a targeted improvement guide for faculty.

This decision-making guide enables nursing educators to strategically direct assessment design efforts toward high-stakes contexts where AI poses the greatest risk to the validity of competency evaluation, while preserving pedagogical flexibility when AI use aligns with professional practice.