CAS+ and AI: An Origin Story and a Diatribe

Can you even call these standards? A self-reflective nerve at the end of my elbow was slammed into a proverbial door jam. The question was posed by consultants CAS had hired to help navigate our future, circa 2023. The context was in relation to the gap between how CAS, as an organization, believes the broader field of higher education uses our “standards.”

After facing the stark reality that rusty PDFs and a downward-sliding relevancy could spell the last days for CAS, change needed to come quickly. Over any other recommendation, the idea of “modernizing and modularizing” standards felt the most realistic. Then again, shifting our business model to publish guides on the best restaurants around the globe did seem appealing, looking at you, Michelin (tire?) company. In the conversation around modernization, the spooky and lingering concept of AI was always hovering above. But whenever broached, was dismissed due to its cost prohibitive nature at the time.

Fast forward to the fateful CAS Governing Board retreat of summer 2024, my first, so obviously I was both nervous and excited. Half-way through the agenda sat an activity. Everyone had written down their own version of a vision statement for CAS. The task was combining everyone’s contributions democratically into a unified statement. Reminiscent of CAS’s current process for updating and revising standards, also, and this is just my commentary, agonizing and inefficient. Woo, feels good to say that out loud. I, as an AI newbie and staff member at Texas State University, had just gotten access to some cool AI enterprise licenses. While the wordsmithing and democratization were in full swing, I decided to upload all the vision statements into AI to combine and summarize. The results were great. I simply dropped the unified statement into the chat, not disclosing AI was the architect. There was a pause, followed by the general acknowledgement, “hey that looks pretty good.” And there it was, the kick-off of our journey to create the CAS+ Portal. There is a whole lot of yadda, yadda-ing in the middle, so I’m going to take some time to indulge and document. But I do believe this first use case was the unofficial kick-off for all the fun, innovation, and grey hairs that were to follow.

As the governing board reconvened over the following months, we would bring examples of how various AI tools helped reconfigure, translate, and generally make the current form of the CAS standards more palatable. Eye-opening would be a proper description of these early efforts. Channeling something our CAS+ Portal project engineer said during the development process, humans have made complicated documents, and now need technology to help translate those complicated documents back to humans. As we grew comfortable with the technology, the conversation turned to how we could leverage these advancements to modernize not just the standards, but the development process as well. For all its uses, standards have been most associated with program review, self-assessment, and evaluation.

Standards were first developed in the spirit of rigorous self-study and the belief that thorough self-evaluation, as opposed to pre-determined benchmarks, would be the optimal pathway to continuous improvement. Structured and quantifiable targets were dismissed due to the belief that the field of higher education is so dynamic that the general field would reject any pre-determined metrics. And that was the prevailing belief in the 80’s!

So, in many ways, our current portal project with its focus on modularization, customization and effective self-study feels like a return to our roots, rather than a bold re-imagining of our purpose. Then there is the big scary two letter monster pulling the levers and powering this whole thing, AI. And not to be reductive about the concerns, the world is changing, and ethical use of this technology is a foreboding challenge. As CAS, we see the ways in which AI can help practitioners and professionals do the work of evaluation and assessment more efficiently. And more broadly, we see the need for higher education to lead in this space as opposed to flatly rejecting the concept.

And to quote the great Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, “the purpose is the purpose.” Gotta love football coach lingo. At the end of the day, all of this is for the students. And what we know about the experience of students, for the sake of oversimplification. They are using these tools, and they are getting extremely mixed messages on how, when, and if they should use AI. In many ways, we owe it to our students to familiarize and guide them in the best way possible to use this new technology, because we know it will continue to settle into their lives and into our campuses.

Broadly speaking, I have talked to many professionals who want to wait until more guidelines, policies, and structures are built before engaging in AI. While an honorable sentiment, I wouldn’t hold my breath. As much as I would like to see a room full of academics, lawmakers, or decision makers figure out the best way to regulate what is already out there. I think the most effective thing we can do as higher education professionals is help guide people in the best ways to interact, engage, and use technology of all types to enhance our work.

If I can end on this parallel, this is not dissimilar from how many “want” the CAS standards to operate. When leading webinars, training, presentations, etc.,  I have noted a certain desire from some who are just engaging with CAS for the standards to tell them exactly how to do something. They want a script, when really the standards are a compass. The standards are, and have always been, a tool to help point you in the right direction, gather the information you need, reflect on, and improve. And in that spirit of compass-makers over scriptwriters, we are thrilled to introduce the world to our new CAS+ Portal. How’s that for a sales pitch?
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