AI Grading Application Gradescope Shortens Grading Times

As a former TA at Berkeley (where Gradescope was founded), I can&#x27;t stress enough how integral Gradescope was to our exam process. It streamlines the process of scanning exams, allows us to grade them online, and then to easily respond to regrade requests.<p>It seems like they&#x27;ve put a lot of work towards eliminating the remaining bottleneck: actually assigning grades (which was done by a dozen profs&#x2F;TAs in 10 hour marathon). Anything that automates busywork and allows teachers to focus on actually teaching sounds amazing!

An investor in gradescope here... As a former TA at Berkeley, I can recall how painful it was to grade exams, especially for lower division classes where you could have hundreds of students. I love the idea of using machine learning to help group common answers. It leaves the judgment in human hands, but helps reduce the grunt work of identifying where that grading applies. A good example of man and machine working together to produce a better result than either could do alone.

This story runs counter to the other story that on the HN front page at the same time, which I enjoy:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12414746" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12414746</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidehighered.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;massachusetts-institute-technology-experiments-instructor-grading-massive-open" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidehighered.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;massachusetts...</a>

It took me until the end of the video to understand that by &quot;ribble&quot;, &quot;rupert&quot;, &quot;rippy&quot;, etc., he meant &quot;rubric&quot;. This does not reflect on the video, which is otherwise clear and to-the-point. I imagine the software is reasonable.

In other words, the student who arrives at the correct answer by using the wrong calculation will still get 100% on the question when using GradeScope because the algorithm says so?<p>Although my guess is the same thing would have happened with the human TA also.

Not taking away any credit from GradeScope folks but being new to AI, I fail to understand how is the underlying system labelled AI. Seems like they have created a rule based rubric for grading &amp; human input can add&#x2F;delete these rules..?

Better than what my calculus labs did - Assigned 30 questions and then randomly marked five of them (same five for everybody) on everyone&#x27;s paper. Thing is - you never knew <i>which</i> five they were going to look at.

&gt; &quot;Karayev said the AI feature attempts to address three challenges ... and, perhaps the toughest of the three, recognizing handwriting&quot;.<p>and it&#x27;s still one of the most complex problems in automated pattern recognition.

Seems like a nice system. But to get any traction they are going to need to be able to integrate into Blackboard and other CMS.<p>Sadly as terrible as Blackboard is, it has a large market share (it must be good on the backend stuff or something because it is terrible to use as an instructor - especially if you teach multiple sections of the same class)

The last time my university experimented with automated grading, every student hated it. (PerusAll)<p>This approach looks much more sane, provided they avoid any false positives slipping into a group.