Teachers Use AI to Grade Essays that Students Write With AI

IBL News | New York

Both college professors and students are increasingly automating some tasks through AI to free up time and avoid fatigue or boredom, allowing them more personalized instruction — despite issues such as accuracy, plagiarism, and ethical integrity.

A report by Tyton Partners and Turnitin found half of college students used AI tools in Fall 2023. The percentage of faculty members grew to 22% in the fall of 2023.

A variety of AI tools and platforms — such as ChatGPT, Writable, Grammarly, and EssayGrader — can assist teachers in grading papers faster and more accurately, writing feedback, developing lesson plans, and creating assignments, quizzes, polls, videos, and interactives pieces for the classroom.

Students, on the other hand, are mostly using ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot — which is built into Word, PowerPoint, and other products.

Schools have formed policies for students but many do not have guidelines for teachers, said CNN in a report.

Grading should remain personalized so teachers can provide more specific feedback and get to know a student’s work, and, therefore, progress over time.

In terms of grading, experts suggest using AI to look at certain metrics — such as structure, language use, and grammar — and give a numerical score on those figures. However, teachers should then grade students’ work themselves when looking for novelty, creativity, and depth of insight.

An example of a lack of integrity can be uploading a student’s work to ChatGPT as well as a potential breach of their intellectual property.

AI tools like ChatGPT use such entries to train their algorithms on everything from patterns of speech to how to make sentences to facts and figures.

Some teachers lean on Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Writable which uses ChatGPT to help grade papers but is “tokenized,” so essays do not include any personal information, and it’s not shared directly with the system.
.