I was an English language arts, and social studies teacher for 20 years. The worst part of my job by far was evaluating essays. Even if we resist machine grading by AI for now, it will eventually be here to stay. And even if the AI grading isn’t perfect, we can work on our prompts to make it better and better. As a human grader/evaulator, despite my best intentions, I am certain that my essay evaluations were likely uneven. If I had 40 essays to mark, while they were hopefully fairly consistent. I’m sure there were still inconsistencies and I’m certain that I gave better feedback to some students than others.
Perhaps the most important thing to consider is that it takes a human a long time to grade 40 or 60 essays, especially if you aim to provide helpful feedback. If AI can provide reasonable and consistent and immediate feedback to our students as writers, I don’t think it is fair to ask them to wait for two weeks while a human marks a whole stack of essays to hand back at once.
Perhaps the human marks the final essay, or the final draft of the essay. In the in between, however, I think we need to consider teaching our students how to ethically use generative AI to access immediate and specific feedback about parts of their writing.
I know there are lots of other points to consider, but as a life-long English teacher, I believe AI is a path to a better way of assessing.
Thoughts?
What I learned today... 