Beyond human subjectivity and error: a novel AI grading system

Abstract

The grading of open-ended questions is a high-effort, high-impact task in education. Automating this task promises a significant reduction in workload for education professionals, as well as more consistent grading outcomes for students, by circumventing human subjectivity and error. While recent breakthroughs in AI technology might facilitate such automation, this has not been demonstrated at scale. It this paper, we introduce a novel automatic short answer grading (ASAG) system. The system is based on a fine-tuned open-source transformer model which we trained on large set of exam data from university courses across a large range of disciplines. We evaluated the trained model's performance against held-out test data in a first experiment and found high accuracy levels across a broad spectrum of unseen questions, even in unseen courses. We further compared the performance of our model with that of certified human domain experts in a second experiment: we first assembled another test dataset from real historical exams - the historic grades contained in that data were awarded to students in a regulated, legally binding examination process; we therefore considered them as ground truth for our experiment. We then asked certified human domain experts and our model to grade the historic student answers again without disclosing the historic grades. Finally, we compared the hence obtained grades with the historic grades (our ground truth). We found that for the courses examined, the model deviated less from the official historic grades than the human re-graders - the model's median absolute error was 44 % smaller than the human re-graders', implying that the model is more consistent than humans in grading. These results suggest that leveraging AI enhanced grading can reduce human subjectivity, improve consistency and thus ultimately increase fairness.