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By the time English teacher Heather Van Otterloo gets about halfway through marking the stack of essays that her middle school students turn in for any one of the dozens of writing assignments she gives each year, she knows it’s about to hit her: grading fatigue.
She might skip leaving a comment that she would have taken the time to write 17 papers ago or be a bit more lenient with her overall evaluation of a piece. In past years, the hours of out-of-school work that she knew she would have to commit to grading limited the number of writing assignments she gave out.
But this year, Van Otterloo, who teaches 6th, 7th, and 8th graders at South Middle School in the Joplin district in Missouri, has found a way to give more frequent writing practice, and offer students more opportunities to revise their work, all while spending about half the time offering feedback. Artificial intelligence is picking up the slack.
Van Otterloo is part of an emerging group of middle and high school teachers using generative AI to help give feedback on—and, in some cases, score—students’ written work. Some educators have harnessed tools built into learning-management systems and writing platforms; others are loading instructions into open-access models like ChatGPT and asking the AI to evaluate student essays against their criteria.
Teachers who take this approach say it solves an age-old dilemma: Giving kids lots of feedback helps them make their writing better but providing it on a regular basis is a near-impossibility for secondary teachers who have upward of 150 students.
But researchers have found that AI can be biased against certain racial and ethnic groups when evaluating writing. And best-practice guides for using AI in education say there should always be a “human in the loop” when grading student work—a teacher reviewing the decisions that AI makes and offering the final verdict.
Van Otterloo said that’s the case in her classroom. She always looks over the AI tool’s comments before handing them over to students and said she tailors feedback to “the kid that I know.”
Even with those safeguards, though, some experts warn that asking computers to judge subjective questions like the strength of an argument or the persuasiveness of an emotional...