The Exam House — April 24, 2020

Artificial intelligence and exam marking

For our next blog a quick review on how of Artificial intelligence is beginning to creep into education around the world.

It is now common for schools in China to use AI or Artificial intelligence to give pupils their marks in exams while the UK starts to investigate through a competition how AI can improve marking of exams .

The system based on machine learning is to understand the logic of the writing and meaning followed by a reasonable judgement of the quality of the essay or exam.

Followed by recommendation of how to improve their style and structure of the essay. In other ways it could be considered to a super spellchecker. Who marks down when the writing goes off topic or doesn’t follow a suitable pattern.

In China, writing in the South China Morning Post - the schools gave an assessment on the technology. Saying it was not close to perfect and had a long way to go. With some wide inaccuracies and it is still in it’s infancy.

The technology is not too dis similar to Google’s machine that beat the best Go player in the world. After training itself.

Here in the UK Ofqual has written a blog around Artificial intelligence asking for better ways to understand how article intelligence will affect schools and exams .

Beth Black, Ofqual’s director of research said Ofqual is hoping to conduct research with an AI competition. Essentially this would mean humans marking essays multiple times. Training the AI to understand what to look for. With those results Ofqual will deploy a competition to see what AI can be trained to get to the same marks from the papers the AI mark. Beth Black insists it is very early days however ‘important to take some steps on this in England, by beginning the exploratory research. ‘

“Similarly, we want to have a deep understanding of the potential risks in operating such technology in our high stakes examinations.”

The UK we have a wide range of marking that teachers can hand over to AI. While giving the teachers more time to teach. Over time the AI will get better and better . With adjustments and gentle improvements if AI can now beat the best Go in the future. Quite soon it will be able to give semantic marks for essays and eventually exams.

Ofqual is looking for schools that are keen to participate . Interested schools can email AI.Challenge@ofqual.gov.uk