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In a notable shift toward sanctioned use of AI in schools, some educators in grades 3–12 are now using a ChatGPT-powered grading tool called Writable, reports Axios. The tool, acquired last summer by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is designed to streamline the grading process, potentially offering time-saving benefits for teachers. But is it a good idea to outsource critical feedback to a machine?
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"Make feedback more actionable with AI suggestions delivered to teachers as the writing happens," Writable promises on its AI website. "Target specific areas for improvement with powerful, rubric-aligned comments, and save grading time with AI-generated draft scores." The service also provides AI-written writing-prompt suggestions: "Input any topic and instantly receive unique prompts that engage students and are tailored to your classroom needs."
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The reliance on AI for grading will likely have drawbacks. Automated grading might encourage some educators to take shortcuts, diminishing the value of personalized feedback. Over time, the augmentation from AI may allow teachers to be less familiar with the material they are teaching. The use of cloud-based AI tools may have privacy implications for teachers and students. Also, ChatGPT isn't a perfect analyst. It can get things wrong and potentially confabulate (make up) false information, possibly misinterpret a student's work, or provide erroneous information in lesson plans.
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there's a divide among parents regarding the use of AI in evaluating students' academic performance. A recent poll of parents revealed mixed opinions, with nearly half of the respondents open to the idea of AI-assisted grading.As the generative AI craze permeates every space, it's no surprise that Writable isn't the only AI-powered grading tool on the market. Others include Crowdmark, Gradescope, and EssayGrader. McGraw Hill is reportedly developing similar technology aimed at enhancing teacher assessment and feedback.
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(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 13 2024, @04:45PM (1 child)
I'm not suggesting "no evaluation". I'm suggesting that grades aren't a good form of evaluation. Compare and contrast these two forms of evaluation:
"Billy shows a strong ability for writing poetry including intuiting advanced rhythmic concepts and slant rhymes, and is comfortable with arithmetic, but struggles with more abstract math like algebra, and also has a hard time with rote learning such as knowing the location of countries and the names of their capital cities."
This is information you would want if you were teaching Billy with the goal of Billy both being able to excel in some things and have a good-enough understanding of everything else to at least manage the challenges life puts in front of him. For example, a geography teacher with that information would be better off trying to teach Billy about Ethiopia by giving Billy some basic information about the country and asking him to write a short poem or stanza about it and its capital, rather than having him draw a map of East Africa. Also notice that this kind of approach suggests that Billy's geography exercises should probably be different than his classmate Jane who would learn this better via the map. Also also notice that if you give Billy and Jane different assignments, they're in a position to cooperate with each other, because both Billy's poem and Jane's map will help in understanding Ethiopia.
"Billy has a GPA of 2.97, and a class rank of 254 of 759. His test score went from 456 to 537 over the last 3 months."
The second evaluation is about something very different, namely how we should set up Billy's education to maximize the gain in test performance while minimizing the cost in time and effort spent on Billy to achieve that gain. And indeed, they might adjust to not focus on Billy at all, but instead on Billy's classroom as a whole, because the goal is to maximize the mean test performance, and maybe it's better to neglect Billy, because Jane can provide a much better test score increase at lower costs and thus make the teacher and school look better to the administration system. And of course it has ranked Billy and Jane to decide once and for all which of them has the superior brain and thus which should get the awards and rewards associated with that. This process, properly applied, will help in refining the assembly line to produce more qualified workers and students for the next level of education. You see what I mean about industrial thinking I hope.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday March 13 2024, @08:18PM
What does this have to do with any of what I posted? At no point did I specify that there needed to be letter or number grades, nor did I say that people need to be ranked as part of the process.
Testing and evaluation is a rather broad category that includes everything from one ranked test with a letter grade to informal measures of engagement like student eye contact and body language. Simply counting the number of times students offer to answer questions in class or ask questions would qualify as well.
The specific type, frequency and weighting of the evaluation should depend a lot on the subject and the ultimate goals of the coursework.