Gradescope Cuts Grading Time in Half, Makes Teachers Lives 50% More Bearable
February 8, 2017
The article titled Professors of the World, Rejoice: Gradescope Brings AI to Grading on Nvidia might more correctly be titled: TAs of the World, Rejoice! In my experience, those hapless, hardworking, underpaid individuals are the ones doing most of the grunt work on college campuses. Any grad student who has faced a stack of essays or tests when their “real work” is calling knows the pain and redundancy of grading. Gradescope is an exciting innovation that cuts the time spent grading in half. The article explains,
The AI isn’t used to directly grade the papers; rather, it turns grading into an automated, highly repeatable exercise by learning to identify and group answers, and thus treat them as batches. Using an interface similar to a photo manager, instructors ensure that the automatically suggested answer groups are correct, and then score each answer with a rubric. In this way, input from users lets the AI continually improve its future predictions.
The trickiest part of this technology was handwriting recognition, and the Berkeley team used a “recurrent neural network trained using the Tesla K40 and GEForce GTX 980 Ti GPUs.” Interestingly, the app was initially created at least partly to prevent cheating. Students have been known to alter their answers after the fact and argue a failure of grading, so a digital record of the paper is extremely useful. This might sound like the end of teachers, but in reality it is the beginning of a giant, global teacher party!
Chelsea Kerwin, February 8, 2017
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