Artificial Intelligence Helps Grade Exams 90% Faster

Four UC Berkeley researchers developed a program to help grade papers during their time working as teaching assistants – and now, they've added artificial intelligence to their app to help instructors speed up the grading process. The team launched the online grading app Gradescope two years ago and have accumulated 10 million answers to around 100,000 questions from a wide range of college courses – the app has already shortened the grading process by 50 percent due to its friendly interface and the ability for multiple teaching assistants to grade papers in parallel. Their new AI features addresses three challenges: identify question types, distinguishing between different written marks, and recognizing handwriting. AI helps turn grading into an automated, highly repeatable exercise by learning to identify and group answers, and thus treat them as batches. The addition of AI promises to slash grading times by as much as 90 percent, said Sergey Karayev, a Gradescope co-founder who finished his PhD in computer science in 2014.