Navigating AI in Higher Education: Toward Culturally Responsive Assessment Frameworks in the GenAI Era

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has precipitated an urgent, global reassessment of how higher education evaluates critical thinking, creative agency, and academic integrity. However, scholarly and institutional responses remain fragmented across cultural contexts, impeding the development of robust, flexible, and discipline-adaptable assessment frameworks. Responding to the imperative to move beyond the traditional standardized assessment paradigm, this study conducts a comparative discourse analysis of 5368 academic articles in Anglophone/Western scholarly discourse (Web of Science, WoS) and Chinese (CNKI). Using LDA topic modeling and Word2Vec-enhanced semantic analysis, the study identifies two divergent orientations: an Anglophone/Western discourse that frames AI as an instrument for cognitive augmentation, efficiency optimization, and functional human–AI collaboration; and a Chinese discourse that emphasizes epistemic sovereignty, the reconstruction of creative subjectivity, and systemic institutional rebuilding against technological alienation. These pathways are mapped onto a tripartite framework of Tools, Creative Subjectivity, and Organizational Ecosystems. The findings demonstrate that AI integration is culturally embedded rather than technically determined, carrying profound implications for assessment validity, academic integrity policy, and equitable access to AI-enhanced learning. The study synthesizes these insights into a culturally responsive assessment framework that redirects evaluation from standardized, product-centric outputs toward process-oriented, transparent, and ethically governed human–AI co-authorship. By centering critical autonomy, AI literacy, and epistemological diversity, this framework offers actionable strategies for inclusive assessment redesign, institutional policy development, and sustainable competency cultivation in the GenAI era.