Challenges of utilizing AI to offer suggestions and grade college students (opinion)
Final spring, CNN printed an article on lecturers utilizing generative AI to grade pupil writing. On social media, a couple of of my colleagues at different establishments immediately complained—earlier than studying the article to see that at the least one individual quoted made the identical level—that if college students are utilizing AI to write down all their papers and lecturers are utilizing it to do all of the grading, then we’d as properly simply hand over on our formal training system totally.
They’re not improper. Thankfully, most college students aren’t solely utilizing AI, and most professors aren’t asking AI to do all their grading. However there’s extra to this concern than the potential for an AI circle jerk, and it illustrates a core drawback with how we’ve conceptualized writing and grading in greater training, one which we should grapple with as the brand new educational yr begins once more.
The article describes a number of professors who’re utilizing AI for grading and giving suggestions, all of whom appear to be enthusiastic about determining how to take action ethically and in ways in which assist their academic mission. I had lots of the identical questions and have been participating in lots of the identical conversations. Final yr, I used to be a fellow on the College of Southern California’s Heart for Generative AI and Society, specializing in the affect AI is having on training and writing instruction. My colleague Mark Marino, impressed by Jeremy Douglass’s “excellent tutor” train, labored together with his college students to write a number of bots (CoachTutor and ReviewerNumber2) to show about rubrics and the way totally different prompts might lead to totally different sorts of suggestions. His preliminary thought was that CoachTutor gave very related suggestions to his personal, and he provided the bots to the remainder of us to strive.
I used these bots in addition to my very own prompts in ClaudeAI and ChatGPT4 to discover the makes use of and limits of AI-generated suggestions on pupil papers. What I discovered led me to a really totally different conclusion than that of the professors cited within the CNN article: Whereas they noticed AI as decreasing the time it takes to grade successfully by permitting school members to deal with higher-level points with content material and concepts, I discovered utilizing it creates extra issues and takes longer if I would like my college students to get significant suggestions slightly than simply an arbitrary quantity or letter grade.
These cited within the article advised that AI might take over grading sure components of writing. As an illustration, a professor of enterprise ethics advised lecturers can depart “construction, language use and grammar” to AI to attain whereas lecturers search for “novelty, creativity and depth of perception.”
That separation displays a quite common view of writing by which thought and construction, concepts and language, are distinct from one another. Professors use rubrics to separate these classes, assign factors to every one after which add them up—however such a separation is basically arbitrary. The type of surface-level buildings and grammar points that the AI can assess are additionally those the AI can edit in a pupil’s writing. However construction and grammar can intertwine with components like creativity, depth and nuance. A lot of my college students develop essentially the most attention-grabbing, artistic concepts by pondering rigorously and critically in regards to the language that buildings our thought on any given subject. My college students can spend half an hour in school working over a single sentence with Richard Lanham’s paramedic methodology, not as a result of extreme prepositional phrases and passive voice are that vital or tough to cut back, however as a result of specializing in them typically reveals deeper issues with the pondering that structured the sentence to start with.
That isn’t an issue simply with AI, in fact. It’s an issue with our grading traditions. Analytic grading with factors provides a way of objectivity and consistency even when writing is much extra advanced. But when we are able to’t belief AI to evaluate novelty or depth of perception as a result of it may well’t truly assume, we shouldn’t belief the AI to supply nuanced suggestions on construction and grammar, both.
Generic in a Particular Manner
The issues with assuming a divide between what AI can consider and what it may well’t are mirrored within the outcomes I had when producing suggestions on pupil work. I began by commenting on pupil papers with out AI help in order that I might not be biased by the outcomes. (Certainly, certainly one of my preliminary considerations about utilizing AI for grading was that if school members are below a time crunch, they are going to be primed to see solely what the AI notices and never what they could have targeted on with out the AI.) With pupil permission, I then ran the papers by way of a number of applications to ask for suggestions.
When utilizing Mark’s bots, I defined the immediate and my objective for the essay and requested for suggestions utilizing the built-in standards. When utilizing ClaudeAI or ChatGPT, I gave the AI the unique immediate for the essay, some context of what the goal of the paper was, certainly one of a number of totally different roles (a writing professor, a writing middle tutor and so forth), and requested particularly for suggestions that will assist a pupil with revision or enchancment of their writing. The AI produced some fairly customary responses: It could ask for extra examples and evaluation, word the necessity for stronger transitions, and the like.
Sadly, these responses have been generic in a really particular method. It grew to become clear over the course of the experiment that the AI was giving variations on the identical suggestions whatever the high quality of the paper. It requested for extra examples or statistics in papers that didn’t want them. It regularly inspired the five-paragraph essay construction—however, sadly, that went towards what I needed, since I (like so many different writing professors on the faculty degree) need college students to develop arguments that go previous the five-paragraph construction. When specializing in language and grammar points, it flattened model and pupil voice.
Even once I rewrote the prompts to mirror my totally different expectations, the suggestions didn’t change a lot. AI provided stronger writers conservative suggestions slightly than encouraging them to take dangers with their language and concepts. It couldn’t distinguish between a pupil who was not pondering in any respect about construction and, as I’ve usually realized to do, one who was making an attempt however failing to create a unique type of construction to assist a extra attention-grabbing argument. The AI suggestions was the identical both method.
In the end, the AI responses have been so formulaic and conservative that they jogged my memory of a clip from The Hunt for Purple October, the place Seaman Jones tells his captain that the pc has misidentified the Purple October submarine as a result of when it will get confused, it “runs residence” to its preliminary coaching knowledge on seismic occasions. Just like the submarine pc, when the AI was offered with one thing out of the extraordinary, it merely discovered the extraordinary inside it based mostly on previous knowledge, with little means to discern what is perhaps each new and useful. Maybe the AIs have been skilled on too many five-paragraph essays.
That mentioned, AI will not be utterly incapable of giving suggestions on extra advanced points. I might get some affordable suggestions if I prompted it to take care of a selected drawback, like “This paper struggles with figuring out the precise contribution it’s making to the dialog, in addition to distinguishing between the creator’s concepts and the concepts of the sources the paper makes use of. How would a writing professor give suggestions on these points?”
But asking an AI to reply to a component of a textual content with out alerting it to the truth that there was an issue was typically inadequate. In a single occasion, I ran a pupil’s essay by way of a number of AI purposes, first asking it to offer suggestions on the thesis and construction with out saying that there was an issue: The physique of the paper and the thesis didn’t line up very properly. Whereas lots of the paragraphs had key phrases that have been associated to the thesis in a normal method, none of them truly addressed what was wanted to assist the central declare. And AI didn’t choose any of that up. It wasn’t till I particularly mentioned, “There’s a drawback with the way in which the construction and content material of the paper’s factors assist the thesis,” and requested, “What’s that drawback and the way might it’s mounted?” that the AI began to supply helpful suggestions, although it nonetheless wanted lots of steering.
Upon listening to about this failure throughout the bots and chat applications, Mark Marino wrote a brand new bot (MrThesis) focusing particularly on thesis and assist. It didn’t do significantly better than the preliminary bots till I once more named the precise drawback. In different phrases, an AI is perhaps used to assist repair issues in a person piece of pupil writing, however it’s much less efficient at figuring out the existence of issues apart from essentially the most banal.
Skeptical Readers, Skeptical Questions
Over the course of this challenge, I used to be compelled to spend extra time making an attempt to get the AI to supply significant suggestions tailor-made to the precise paper than I did simply writing the suggestions on my preliminary cross by way of the paper. AI isn’t a time saver for professors if we are literally making an attempt to offer significant reactions to pupil papers which have advanced points. And its suggestions on issues like construction can truly do extra hurt than good if not rigorously curated—curation that simply takes as a lot time as writing the suggestions ourselves.
I do imagine there are methods to make use of AI within the classroom for suggestions, however all of them require a pre-existing consciousness of what the issue is. If professors are so crunched for time they want AI to make grading go sooner, that displays greater points with our employment and instructing, not the precise ability or accuracy of AI.
Final yr, my college students struggled with figuring out counterarguments to their concepts. College students typically lack the power to consider new matters from different views, as a result of they haven’t totally developed subject material experience. So now I educate college students to make use of AI to ask questions from different views. For instance, I’ve them select paragraphs from their paper and ask, “What would a skeptical reader ask in regards to the following paragraph?” or “What questions would an professional on X have about this paragraph?” After a semester of utilizing such questions with AI, I heard my college students echo them of their ultimate peer-review classes, taking over the function of a skeptical reader and asking their very own skeptical questions—and that’s the type of studying that I would like!
However that is totally totally different than the type of evaluative suggestions that comes within the type of a grade. During the last two years of AI availability, it’s develop into clear that AI instruments mirror again at customers the biases of their knowledge units, programmers and customers themselves. Even after we put “guidelines” in place to guard towards identified biases, it may well simply backfire when moved simply barely exterior an assumed context—as when Google’s Gemini produced a “numerous” group of 4 1943 German troopers, together with one Black man and one Asian lady.
Utilizing AI for grading papers won’t solely mirror again a scarcity of real important interested by pupil work but additionally years of biases about writing and writing instruction which have resulted in mechanized writing—biases that professors like me have spent quite a lot of time and vitality making an attempt to dismantle. These biases, or the issues with new guidelines to stop biased outcomes, simply gained’t be as seen as an AI-generated picture staring us within the face.
