We heard the news about exams being graded by bots, but it seems like in the AI age, we can expect any teachers’ work to be delegated to AI. This time, we are talking about assignment grading.
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Key Takeaways:
- Despite initial skepticism, teachers are increasingly turning to AI, like GPT-4’s Vision, to automate tasks such as grading and providing feedback on student work.
- While AI shows promise in assisting with grading and feedback, there are challenges and limitations to consider. Some teachers report issues with AI’s reasoning capabilities, noting that it can be prone to errors and not yet able to account for individual learning levels.
- There’s a potential for AI to become a valuable classroom assistant, helping teachers focus on providing detailed feedback and tailored support to students. There is optimism that with AI’s help, education can be adjusted to each learner’s needs, but this requires openness to change and digitalization.
As was reported on Reddit, teachers are apparently going all in with using AI and now are turning to the recent GPT-4’s Vision program to keep some grading work off their shoulders. And why wouldn’t they? Since ChatGPT appeared and various other AI-powered bots started to grow their audience, many students turned to these tools for help with their assignments. Some used it for outlines and inspiration, others decided not to be as discreet and worked with AI to complete their full tasks.
Educators, who weren’t initially so happy about the whole AI popularity situation, now decided to turn the situation to their advantage. If their students cracked the code of efficient and quick work, why couldn’t they do the same? The news has raised the debate right away, with many being skeptical as to whether using even an advanced version of GPT-4 would allow teachers to carry out sufficient grading.
What Do Teachers Think
We’ve gone through the comments and it seems that educators themselves were surprised to see such news. As it turns out, most of them are still checking their students’ work manually, as they feel they can’t rely on AI considering their poor performance in reasoning.
“Meanwhile teachers are actually still grading manually because ChatGPT cannot follow reasoning. But all the parents are against a pay rise that keeps up with inflation because “AI does your work now”, because of posts like this. A bright future indeed.”
One teacher even confessed that they try using GPT for grading each time they update to a newer version, which still hasn’t led to any positive results.
“The usual issue is that it’s so lenient and defaults to giving more points than justified. The next issue is that blank answers confuse it and cause it to hallucinate enough to make it unreliable. Then, it’s notoriously bad at tallying up the points. In the end, I’d spend just as much time prompting and revising its work and could have just graded it myself.”
However, in their case, it seems like the problem may be with the subject of the graded assignments, which is AP Physics. Still, with even that taken into account, most would agree that current LLMs available to the public couldn’t do such a great job with grading, no matter whether it would be GPT or Opus. This leaves a question open: are there any teachers who tried using AI for grading and succeeded?
The Story of One Pioneer
Even though, scrolling through the comments under the Reddit post, we generally saw teachers only being disappointed with AI, there was one story that stood out. A teacher from grade school decided to come forward with his successful attempts at implementing LLM to solve the problem of overworking.
“Everyone agrees we are overworked and do not have enough time in the day to get everything done that is asked of us. I will be using an App to give my students feedback on their written stories.”
In their opinion, using LLMs for grade school is a perfect opportunity, since, for such an education level and considering every assignment is formalized, they are capable of providing good feedback. They can easily check for repetitions, use of certain phrases and adjectives, spelling, descriptions of feelings, etc, which are the basic assessment markers for grade school tasks. However, according to the story, AIs can be used in other instances aside from grading.
“I use DeepL’s writer to give students ideas on how to formulate an idea they have. It is a godsent for my foreign language students who suddenly also have a voice in my German-speaking classroom.”
In this instance, the teachers confess that their chosen app can even provide better commentary than theirs since it can quickly reference the students’ writing and expand in detail on what can be improved. Still, even with the successful use of AI for assessment, certain pitfalls can’t be ignored.
“The only thing it does not do yet is take into account a student’s learning level. I can use the feedback the students receive to talk to each student about their stories and feedback individually. The feedback aims at “optimal” for everything. We agree to focus on certain aspects of the feedback.”
The key lesson we can learn from this story is that AI actually can become a classroom assistant many teachers long for. With bots handling simple stuff like figuring out how many spelling mistakes student A made in their work, educators can concentrate on providing more detailed feedback focused on overall improvements of students’ skills. And as more advanced tools will be coming forward, who knows, maybe we will finally be able to tailor education to every learner’s needs. The key here is to be open to change, and specifically, digitalization.
“Realistically schools are giant data farms, we just are really bad at digitalizing the data we produce, so teachers are forced to collect all their data by hand (stuff like categorizing spelling mistakes, reading levels, math levels…)…I just hope the system is open to change and does not cling to old categories of thinking about school and education for the sake of tradition.”
Students’ Share of Thoughts
Aside from teachers, the news also attracted some students who decided to weigh in on the matter. Of course, many saw the irony in the fact that now, students will submit their ChatGPT-written assignments just to receive AI-created assessments. Yet, some of them saw it as a practical opportunity to make sure your assignments are written according to the task requirements.
“My thoughts are, you do the assignment by yourself and ask ChatGPT to grade you to make sure you’ve answered the rubric…Alternatively, guide you throught the assignment and give you tips where to make it stronger. You don’t want it writing it for you.”
And the truth is, teachers don’t see such use of AI as bad at all. Of course, for them, it is worse when students use GPT to fully write texts for them (which also turns out bad). Yet, they don’t see anything wrong with the limited use of this technology, especially since it is here to stay anyway.
“I’m moving towards allowing limited use rather than an outright ban because students are going to use it anyway, and instead teach them how to responsibly and ethically use it to help them learn and understand aspects of the assignment.”
Conclusion
Whether this news is true or not doesn’t matter, because as the discussion showed, there are teachers who aren’t afraid of technology and are even more happy to welcome it into their hard daily routines. The only problem that there is now, is the quality of available solutions and the fact that there is no general plan for their proper implementation into the curriculum. This leaves educators alone with their problems and puts the responsibility of finding ways out on their shoulders. So, the main question is: how can teachers learn the new technologies to the extent that will allow them to effectively use them to minimize their workload?
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