For years, humans have been the ones to grade all of the tests.
However, a new grading system rolled out by the Texas Education Agency is bringing the future of grading to classrooms.
Better known as an "automated scoring engine," it would automatically grade students' written answers for the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness tests, otherwise known as STAAR.
STAAR tests are designed to test Texas students and see if they are ready to jump up to the next level.
“The test at the end of the school year, that is there to gauge whether or not students are prepared for that grade level and then ready to move on to the next grade level," MISD Associate Superintendent Ashley Osborne said.
Before the AI bots came in, tests were usually graded by humans.
“In prior years, the STAAR writing portion was graded by two graders," Osborne said. "People would read the various selections or read the responses from students and they would grade those responses.”
Tests won't be fully graded by AI. If a computer has "low confidence" in an assigned score or if it doesn't recognize a type of response, those scores will get reassigned to a human. A random sample of responses will also be handed to a human to check the computer's work.
However, this new "hybrid" grading system will be incorporating both humans and computers for grading.
“They are going to be utilizing that again for the spring administration," Osborne said. "So the assessments that our students recently took for STAAR reading and language arts will be graded, or at least portions of those, will be graded by that automated scoring engine.”
To some, the move wasn’t that big of a shock.
In fact, some teachers are already using AI to lighten their load.
“I’m not surprised by that, the sophistication of artificial intelligence today really allows us to use it in a variety of areas, so was not surprised that we’re using it in that realm," ECISD Superintendent Dr. Scott Muri said. "We currently have teachers already using artificial intelligence in our own classrooms to assist with some of the analysis portion of the grading process."
Some administrators say more research must be done before a firm policy can be put in place regarding the expansion of AI.
“Right now we have a team that is looking at how we need to incorporate AI into our district," Osborne said. "We actually are looking at writing a policy for not only the students utilizing AI, but also how do teachers utilize that in the classroom as well.”