Dean's Brief 5 · Monday, October 5, 2026

If Judgment Is the Skill, Can You Assess It?

The decision: Stop asking whether students used AI. Start asking whether they can explain, adapt, and defend what they turned in. That is judgment, and it can be assessed without a detector.

What is happening

Employers say judgment is the skill that matters now that competent answers are cheap. Admissions offices are quietly adding situational judgment tests because personal statements no longer tell them much. A Forbes contributor asked the AI in Education list this month whether higher education can measure and develop judgment at all. The honest answer is that we already do, in clinical rotations, studio critiques, moot courts, and capstones. We just never called it that, and we never did it in the lecture courses where most credits are earned.

In Judgment Call I break managerial judgment into five learnable elements: framing the question, weighing evidence, reading context, naming the values at stake, and owning the result. The same five elements are a rubric. A student who can do them with an AI draft in hand is learning. One who cannot is not, however clean the file.

Three moves

1. Add one judgment assessment per course. A local case with incomplete information, a trade-off the student must choose and defend, or an explanation of why the AI's answer is wrong for this situation. Fifteen minutes of oral defense beats fifteen pages of detection reports.
2. Make the process the evidence. Drafts, the prompts used, the source checks, and a short reflection count toward the grade. A student who shows the work has shown the judgment.
3. Report it. Add one line to program learning outcomes: "Graduates can evaluate, adapt, and defend AI-assisted work in their field." Accreditors will ask for this within two cycles. Be first.

What to say

To faculty: "Grade the thinking you can see, not the text you cannot verify." To students: "You will be asked to defend your work out loud. Plan for it."

Monday step

Pick the three largest-enrollment courses in your college. Ask each instructor what one assignment would look like if students had to defend it in person. That conversation is the readiness plan.

Source: AI in Education listserv, Oct. 22, 2026 (Forbes call for sources on measuring judgment).

Thomas J. Norman, Ph.D., is a professor of management at California State University, Dominguez Hills, a past department chair and acting associate dean, faculty founder of the CSUDH Innovation Incubator, and a member of the Academic Senate of the CSU's GenAI subcommittee on privacy, security, and procurement. All briefs · Reply to Tom