When asking AI to generate feedback, you need to tell the AI:


Finally, when students submit their work, the AI will provide them with feedback on their writing, along with a grade. The feedback and grade are based on the auto-generated rubric, or on rubrics or any other documents uploaded by the teacher.


That is not a problem just with AI, of course. It’s a problem with our grading traditions. Analytic grading with points gives a sense of objectivity and consistency even when writing is far more complex. But if we can’t trust AI to assess novelty or depth of insight because it can’t actually think, we shouldn’t trust the AI to offer nuanced feedback on structure and grammar, either.

Next, Flint will automatically set up an AI writing tutor that will provide students feedback on their writing without doing any of the work for them.

Below are two examples of feedback that the AI tool generated.

The research team put the tool to work in the Spring 2021 session of Stanford’s , a free online course now in its third year. In the five-week program, based on Stanford’s popular introductory computer science course, hundreds of teach basic programming to learners worldwide, in small sections with a 1:10 teacher-student ratio.

The problems with assuming a divide between what AI can evaluate and what it can’t are reflected in the results I had when generating feedback on student work. I started by commenting on student papers without AI assistance so that I would not be biased by the results. (Indeed, one of my initial concerns about using AI for grading was that if faculty members are under a time crunch, they will be primed to see only what the AI notices and not what they might have focused on without the AI.) With student permission, I then ran the papers through several programs to ask for feedback.

Those cited in the article suggested that AI could take over grading certain elements of writing. For instance, a professor of business ethics suggested teachers can leave “structure, language use and grammar” to AI to score while teachers look for “novelty, creativity and depth of insight.”

The researchers trained the tool, called M-Powering Teachers (the M stands for machine, as in machine learning), to detect the extent to which a teacher’s response is specific to what a student has said, which would show that the teacher understood and built on the student’s idea. The tool can also provide feedback on teachers’ questioning practices, such as posing questions that elicited a significant response from students, and the ratio of teacher/student talk time.


Discover the best AI tools - Free and paid - Essay Feedback

The article describes several professors who are using AI for grading and giving feedback, all of whom seem to be interested in figuring out how to do so ethically and in ways that support their educational mission. I had many of the same questions and have been engaging in many of the same conversations. Last year, I was a fellow at the , focusing on the impact AI is having on education and writing instruction. My colleague Mark Marino, inspired by Jeremy Douglass’s “” exercise, worked with his students to several bots ( and ) to teach about rubrics and how different prompts could result in different kinds of feedback. His initial thought was that CoachTutor gave very similar feedback to his own, and he offered the bots to the rest of us to try.

Using AI Tools to Give Feedback on High School Students Writing

I used those bots as well as my own prompts in ClaudeAI and ChatGPT4 to explore the uses and limits of AI-generated feedback on student papers. What I found led me to a very different conclusion than that of the professors cited in the CNN article: While they saw AI as reducing the time it takes to grade effectively by allowing faculty members to focus on higher-level issues with content and ideas, I found using it creates more problems and takes longer if I want my students to get meaningful feedback rather than just an arbitrary number or letter grade.

Brisk Teaching: Free AI Tools for Teachers and Educators

Last spring, CNN published on teachers using generative AI to grade student writing. On social media, a few of my colleagues at other institutions instantly complained—before reading the article to see that at least one person quoted made the same point—that if students are using AI to write all their papers and teachers are using it to do all the grading, then we might as well just give up on our formal education system entirely.

How Teachers Can Use AI to Provide Effective Essay Feedback

He currently sits on a committee at his college that’s authoring an AI policy for faculty and staff; discussions are ongoing, not just for how teachers use AI in the classroom but how it’s used by educators in general.

How to use AI to Generate Student Feedback | Hong Kong TESOL

Some schools are actively working on policies for both teachers and students. Alan Reid, a research associate in the Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) at Johns Hopkins University, said he recently spent time working with K-12 educators who use GPT tools to create end-of-quarter personalized comments on report cards.