Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI. What could possibly go wrong.
Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI. What could possibly go wrong.
The TEA is adamant that the system doesn’t count as AI, though.
I can imagine so many incredible ideas being shit canned simply because the ai has never seen it before
I think this is overrating the extent to which a LLM can even really read.
As someone that curates AI as a side gig, pure shitshow inc
We need a burning flag emoji specifically for Texas
The TEA is right about one thing: calling early 21st century machine learning systems "AI" is letting the marketers win. The scoring system is not an "intelligence" in the sense most people would understand the term to mean.
Whatever gets us to realize standardized tests are horseshit
Man I love the word horseshit in human conversation. No horseshit.
So your school tax budget will be decided by an AI grader?
From the very beginning of this LLM craze, they've been talking about replacing teachers with it. I suspect they're going to ham slice their way into education one precedent at a time until every child gets their entire education through an iPad that talks at them with the Microsoft Sam voice (unless you're rich, elite private schools won't go anywhere near this stuff).
There were computerized test scoring machines 40 years ago, they were called Scan-tron.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Students in Texas taking their state-mandated exams this week are being used as guinea pigs for a new artificial intelligence-powered scoring system set to replace a majority of human graders in the region.
The STAAR exams, which test students between the third and eighth grades on their understanding of the core curriculum, were redesigned last year to include fewer multiple-choice questions.
According to a slideshow hosted on TEA’s website, the new scoring system was trained using 3,000 exam responses that had already received two rounds of human grading.
Some safety nets have also been implemented — a quarter of all the computer-graded results will be rescored by humans, for example, as will answers that confuse the AI system (including the use of slang or non-English responses).
A 2019 report from Motherboard found that they were being used in at least 21 states to varying degrees of success, though TEA seems determined to avoid the same reputation.
The attempt to draw a line between them isn’t surprising — there’s no shortage of teachers despairing online about how generative AI services are being used to cheat on assignments and homework.
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