Practicing What We Teach: Aligning Counterterrorism Assessment with Analytical Realities

This is authored by Cesar Alvarez | Course Director, Security Studies | Lecturer in Terrorism Studies | Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security

Context – Why this mattered

My students are postgraduates in online counterterrorism and security studies subjects, most already working in the field. Like colleagues across higher education, I’ve had to reckon with what generative AI does to a simple assumption: that a written analytical product, an intelligence brief, an essay, a strategic report, genuinely reflects the student’s own thinking.

I want to frame this as a learning risk, not only an integrity risk. If assessment only ever looks at the page, we may be certifying students who can produce polished writing without having demonstrated they can reason like an analyst. In a discipline where the professional skill is analytical judgement under scrutiny, that gap matters.

Human Insight – What changed my thinking

Once I introduced supervised Mini Vivas alongside written submissions, a gap sometimes opened between what a student had written and what they could explain and defend out loud. That was the turning point. This stopped being a “catch the AI use” problem and became a “does our assessment actually assure the capability” problem. The capability that moved to the centre of my thinking was the ability to explain and defend your own analysis in real time, exactly what the profession demands in briefings, interviews, and giving evidence.

Practice – What I redesigned

I added supervised Mini Vivas alongside the written work, not instead of it, built around three deliberate choices. Operationally, I reduced friction at the point of booking, since friction was quietly driving procrastination and avoidance. Relationally, I framed the conversation explicitly as professional dialogue rather than interrogation, and built in warm, calm, structured delivery to lower anxiety so genuine analytical performance could surface. Institutionally, I had to sit with harder, still-open questions: how oral evidence should interact with formal misconduct processes, and whether these conversations should be recorded.

What I stopped doing was treating the written product as the sole assessment artefact. The oral component isn’t a bolt-on integrity check anymore, it’s now integral to how I assure authenticity and learning.

Impact – What changed and how I know

Three kinds of evidence stand out. On learning, the Mini Vivas surfaced genuine analytical understanding, or its absence, that wasn’t always visible in writing alone. On engagement, reducing booking friction measurably improved participation and completion. On perception, students reported that the process helped them understand their own analytical decisions, and valued the direct contact with staff, particularly valuable in a fully online environment.

This reflective blog post is part of the Faculty’s Learning and Teaching SLOWposium 2026: Elevate session. Continue the conversation by exploring the reflections of our fellow presenters and discovering new perspectives on learning and teaching. Read the other presenters’ reflections here.

Here is Cesar’s presentation slide