Texas is moving grading high school student exams to an AI system

Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

Texas students taking mandatory state exams have become "guinea pigs" for a new grading system based on artificial intelligence. The system is designed to replace most of the region's human examiners.

Here's What We Know

The Texas Tribune reports that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is implementing an "automated scoring system" that uses natural language processing technology. It will be used to score open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exams.

TEA estimates that the new system will save $15-20 million a year by reducing the need for human scorers. It plans to hire fewer than 2,000 evaluators this year instead of 6,000 in 2023.

STAAR exams have been restructured to include seven times as many open-ended questions that used to require lengthy manual review. The TEA hopes AI will help handle this volume.

However, some educators have expressed concerns about the quality of the automated assessment. Lewisville School District Superintendent Lori Rapp said that when the new system was tested in December 2023, "there was a dramatic increase in the number of responses that received a score of zero."

TEA emphasises that its system is different from publicly available AI services because it is closed-source and does not teach itself. Nevertheless, teachers are concerned that students will try to "bypass the system" as they do with generative AI cheating tools.

Source: Texas Tribune