If You Use AI to Grade Student Writing, Stop or Quit Your Job

Some things you can't be polite about.

I am deeply understanding of the unreasonable demands on teachers at every level. For much of my career as a non-tenure track college instructor, teaching exclusively writing-intensive courses, I lived it.

There were times, many times, when confronted with 100 or more pieces of student writing that had to be assessed and commented on between collecting them on a Thursday and returning them by Tuesday that I felt like I would’ve done anything for a little relief.

The focus of my writing about teaching writing has been to advocate for improving the conditions under which instructors and teachers do their work. Some of this is involves changing writing pedagogy, but most of it is really just observing that we do not appropriately resource the work we say want teachers to do.

The structural impediments preventing us from having even minimally acceptable, (let alone ideal), conditions are real, damaging to students and teachers, and something we should continue to be loud about forever and ever. We have systemic problems that make it too hard for teachers to do their work even as we demand that work be done.

I offer this long preamble as context for what I’m about to say which may come across as harsh or dismissive of the conditions people work in, but I believe what I’m about to say with every fiber of my being, so I’m going to say it.

If you use AI to grade student writing, you should either stop or quit your job.

The primary point of producing this edition of the newsletter is to share the piece below from Marc Watkins that captures why using AI to grade student writing should be viewed as anathema. Everyone should read it, and I don’t just mean teachers, I mean everyone.

The Dangers of using AI to Grade

Marc makes the clear, succinct, and true case here:

AI as an assessment tool represents an existential threat to education because no matter how you try and establish guardrails or best practices around how it is employed, using the technology in place of an educator ultimately cedes human judgment to a machine-based process. It also devalues the entire enterprise of education and creates a situation where the only way universities can add value to education is by further eliminating costly human labor.

Yes, yes, yes, amen, yes.

I have been making the case against algorithmic grading long before ChatGPT showed up. This piece dates from 2013 and was predicated by the enthusiasm of the developers of MOOCs who saw grading automation as a way to deliver these courses “at scale.”

Those attempts failed, as did MOOCs, when it comes to taking over the lion’s share of our post-secondary educational system, not only because of technical limitations, but because people recognized there is value in the human exchange of reading and writing. We should not give this thing of value over to a simulation, no matter how convincing that simulation may now have become.

It is an abandonment of our humanity for no discernible gain beyond efficiency. As I’ve written in this newsletter previously, efficiency is not a value we should associate with learning. Learning is rooted in connection, engagement, and productive friction.

Grading student writing is difficult and time-consuming, but it is also necessary. If a teacher or instructor is bored by what their students are producing - as I once was - they should change what they’re asking students to do so boredom isn’t an expected byproduct of the experience. There’s nothing inherent to writing and grading that says it must be boring. I’m here to testify that it can actually be quite interesting.

(Though it was always be time-consuming. This is just the price of entry.)

When people believe writing instruction is substandard I will continue to direct focus to those things that are most dispositive, the poor structures and incentives we provide to the task.

But the fact that these conditions exist does not absolve individuals from their responsibilities. People using AI to grade student writing are committing malpractice. It is bad for students, for the teachers themselves, for education, and for society as a whole.

It must stop.