AI marking means uni assessments could theoretically never be read by a human. What now?

Résumé détaillé

AI marking has been around a long time. But it’s not the tech causing outcry – it’s what happens now that it’s readily available.

There’s a doomsday scenario where uni students hand in work generated by artificial intelligence (AI), which is then marked by AI and university assessment no longer involves any humans at all.

There’s also an alternative utopia where teachers use AI to escape the burden and time pressures of endless piles of marking. In this bright new “AI-powered” world, bias against student differences is avoided and staff use the extra free time to engage in high-quality teaching and research.

Most people don’t realise AI marking has been commercially developed since at least 1998. The educational publisher Pearson reports its specialised trained systems have scored 39 million responses, including essays, short answers and equations.

In previous decades, the tech was an expensive specialist product that may not have been easy for unis to access. But this has changed as AI has become more readily available.

AI models, such as ChatGPT, predict what mark should be awarded by comparing the textual patterns of a student’s work to other long-standing texts. If the AI has been trained on a lot of texts similar to the assessment task, its predictions are more likely to be closer to a human’s response.

With an openly available AI, such as ChatGPT or Claude, a teacher could upload an essay and a rubric and ask AI to grade and provide feedback on the essay.

This article is part of a series on how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping higher education.

We take a deeper look into how AI has disrupted degrees, how universities are responding to these new challenges and what the technology means for the sector’s future. You can find more stories here.

Universities are generally not advertising their approaches to AI marking. But policies are guided by strong privacy regulations. Some universities state how this intersects with AI.

Début de l'article, extrait de The Conversation AU. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.