Health professions programs move assessment from recall to reasoning

Programs are shifting from multiple-choice toward assessing a student's reasoning process in simulated settings, and adding explicit AI-literacy coursework, as generative AI makes the recalled answer trivial to produce.

Why it matters

The move is concrete: fewer single-answer questions, more tasks that ask a student to show and defend a line of clinical reasoning.

The programs going first treat AI not as a threat to integrity but as the reason to assess something more durable than recall.

What to watch

Whether accrediting bodies treat reasoning-based assessment as compliant, or as a risk to defend against.