Your homework is being graded by A.I. Now let’s look at what goes wrong.
Your homework is being graded by A.I. Now let’s look at what goes wrong.
In the year 2025, artificial intelligence is doing more than simply assisting pupils with their schoolwork; it is also grading it. Education institutions all around the globe are rapidly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to grade essays, verify exams, analyze short responses, and even provide feedback on student projects. This trend is occurring at all levels of education, from high schools to universities. It offers increased uniformity, saving time, and reducing expenses all at the same time. The issue is that artificial intelligence does not always get things properly.
Whenever you have had your work evaluated by an artificial intelligence, you could have had the impression that the feedback was a bit… odd. It’s possible that the comments didn’t get your major point, that they criticized your inventiveness, or that they didn’t follow your writing style. This is not a product of your thoughts. Although artificial intelligence is capable of crunching statistics and recognizing patterns more quickly than any instructor, it often struggles with subtlety, meaning, and context, which are the same elements that give education its significance.
Therefore, let’s take a more in-depth look at what artificial intelligence grading tools are now accomplishing, where they are failing, and why human insight is still important in the learning process.
The Way in Which Artificial Intelligence Became the Grading Chair
The emergence of artificial intelligence in grading begins with a straightforward issue: instructors are swamped with work. Something has to go in order to accommodate the ever-increasing number of papers to mark, the limited resources available, and the expanding class numbers. This is where artificial intelligence came into play, providing a means to automate the laborious aspects of evaluation.
At first, artificial intelligence was used for multiple-choice and true/false tests, which were areas in which there were unambiguous right and incorrect answers, which made automation simple. But over the course of the last several years, language models have progressed to the point that they are now capable of reading essays, analyzing sentence structure, checking grammar, identifying instances of plagiarism, and even evaluating the strength of arguments. There is now a guarantee that platforms will grade thousands of papers in a matter of minutes, which is something that no human instructor can accomplish.
There are certain educational systems that have gone all in, use artificial intelligence to mark work, offer grades, and give quick feedback. Following the submission of their work, students are provided with an automatic score and comments in a matter of seconds.
Efficacy is achieved. It can be scaled up. On the other hand, it is severely defective in ways that the majority of people do not fully comprehend.
What Artificial Intelligence Does Right When It Comes to Grading
Let’s be honest: artificial intelligence isn’t completely pointless. As a matter of fact, it excels in a few specific abilities. It is able to identify grammatical faults, provide suggestions for how to phrase things more clearly, highlight spelling issues, and even pinpoint patterns of plagiarism more accurately than the typical human being. However, artificial intelligence is really highly trustworthy when it comes to structure, formatting, and feedback at the surface level.
AI is capable of grading with an astonishing level of consistency in large-scale standardized assessments, in which students are required to respond in a certain manner or in accordance with a predetermined rubric. In addition, it does not experience fatigue, it does not forget the criteria, and it does not inject any personal bias into the process, at least not on purpose. However, when a student makes an effort to break the pattern, go beyond the template, or write with a voice that is distinctive, artificial intelligence often fails to get the meaning fully.
A Dissection of the AI Grading System
One of the most significant problems with artificial intelligence grading is that it has difficulty with depth and uniqueness. A significant number of students who take risks in their writing, such as challenging traditional concepts or use innovative metaphors, discover that their work is graded down because the artificial intelligence does not “get it.” Patterns, not meaning, are what machines are taught to recognize. Conformity, not invention, is highly rewarded by them.
Emotional intelligence is completely absent from AI. It does not comprehend tone in the same way that a human being does. There is a possibility that a sarcastic phrase might be seen as disrespectful. It’s possible that a lyrical paragraph might be considered ambiguous. In addition, personal comments, which are the sort that need empathy and life experience to assess, are sometimes reduced to a score that is dependent on the length of the phrase and the difficulty of the word.
Moreover, there is the problem of bias in the data used for training. The majority of AI models rely on academic literature from Western schools for their training. Consequently, it is possible that they may not place sufficient weight on various cultural expressions, casual writing styles, or other methods to formatting. This results in grades that are not fair, particularly for students who are writing in a second language or who come from a variety of different backgrounds.
An other significant issue is the absence of transparency. When an artificial intelligence (AI) gives a pupil a negative grade, the student often does not understand the reason for the mark. There is a possibility that the system may provide ambiguous feedback or general recommendations; nevertheless, the explanation behind the score is often concealed behind intricate algorithms. Students have a more difficult time learning, growing, and defending their work as a result of this.
