Teachers Are Using AI to Grade Papers—While Banning Students From It

Students love using AI. Teachers hate when students use AI. Yet, teachers love using AI to help grade papers, some of which were probably written by AI, at least in part.

The New York Times covered the push and pull of AI in the educational world, where both teachers and students are using chatbots. But the whys and hows are up for debate. Teachers are feeding ChatGPT years of curriculum so it can spit out lesson plans while side-eyeing kids using Google Lens to solve algebra problems.

AI is Taking Over Our Schools

A D.C. school administrator named Alex Baron thinks those apps are cheating. But also? He uses AI to separate the students into different groups by their academic performances and behavioral data so he can more acutely target their individual needs.

Is it a contradiction? A little bit of hypocrisy from our supposedly wise elders? Or is it as Jon Gold, middle school history teacher from Providence, Rhode Island, describes it: “I am more pro-AI-literacy than I am pro-AI-use.”

Some educators are leaning in, like Texas school tech guru Maurie Beasley, who uses bots to tailor math problems to each student, from baseball trajectories to pirouetting dancers. Texas overall, seems to be going all in on AI, despite its glaring flaws.

In 2020, the state spent nearly $400 million on an automated essay grading system that mis-scored thousands of student essays. School officials in Dallas noticed something was off about some of the test scores the system was spitting out, so they submitted around 4600 pieces of student writing for grading, and 2,000 of them came back with a higher score.

Does any of this technology truly work? Are we all just buying into the illusion of efficiency that they provide? Those are vitally important questions that we unfortunately have no time to sit around and debate because the world of educational technology is in the midst of an AI gold rush.

AI companies desperate to shovel their wares into the gaping maws of whoever’s willing to fork over the cash are pitching things like an AI that critiques a teacher’s performance after analyzing footage of the teacher at work. It’s all either vaguely or extremely dystopian.