The Grading Podcast

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Boz: I get what you’re saying, but also if we are utilizing these tools to do a, to free up our time so that we can now be more focused on that contextual understanding, on making those connections with our students on that emotional intelligence and connections with our students, wouldn’t that be a better use of our time? ‘Cause the AI is never gonna replace that.

Sharona: Yes. If that’s what we’re doing.

Boz: Exactly.

Sharona: And that’s my concern because in these big classes and these R1 research institutions, the students already feel like their instructor doesn’t care.

Boz: Welcome to the grading podcast. We’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students’, learning from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students’ success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the Grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am tired. It’s been a long few weeks, I’ve got shows wrapping up. But by the time this episode comes out, it’s gonna be very close to the end of the semester, which is going to be bittersweet for me because on the one hand I’m always so glad to finish a semester. And on the other hand, my son is moving to New York and ugh, I’m tired. Hopefully that’s not gonna come across in the pod today though, because I have a lot of really exciting things to talk about. How are you doing?

Boz: I’m doing all right. I’m actually really excited because one of the things that we kinda get to talk about is the grading conference schedule is out. Yes. It’s, so get to get to showcase and I’d like to talk a little bit about that today.

Sharona: And one thing that’s really interesting for me, just thinking back over the last number of years of the conference is we used to get a break from the conference. Like we used to finish a conference and four or five, six months later we’d pick it up again. That doesn’t happen anymore. Like we literally schedule the first meeting of the organizing committee for the next conference is about a month after this conference. Like we give ourselves like July off. So

Boz: I You give yourself July off.

Sharona: This is true. The organizing committee doesn’t meet, but I actually help you with all those videos.

Boz: Yeah. ’cause I’m the one that goes in, and so what are the things that’s unique about the grading conference if you’ve never been to it? Or if you haven’t heard, is we record all of our sessions. Sometimes the keynotes are exceptions, but we record and we post on the Center for Grading Reforms’ website, all the past events. So yeah, that’s usually part of my role in, in the organizing committee is getting all those up and edited and out. So yeah, you get July off. I don’t.

Sharona: But anyway, this is a year-round project for us, but one of the big milestones is when the conference schedule comes out because it is the culmination of months of work, of getting the schedule organized, recruiting the keynotes, and then asking for abstracts and doing an abstract review. And yes, I very much would like to talk about some of the things on the schedule.

Boz: But what is also different over the last couple of years is because the organizing committee has grown and we have been able to, divide the work a lot more so in the last few years, you and I usually have not been part of the abstract committee, so this is our first time looking at it too. So it’s really it, it’s bittersweet ’cause we’re not part of that ’cause we can’t be part of everything. But it’s also really fun when this gets to come out. ’cause it’s a surprise to us too.

Sharona: And I’m really feeling like a parent watching their kid grow up because.

Boz: Yeah, because you’re the orig, you’re the only original.

Sharona: I’m the OG. I’m the OG or one of the OG organizers. The only one still actively involved day to day, although the others are still involved with the Center. And I’m really excited if I can dive in, I wanna share one thought about one of the talks on day one. That is why I am feeling like a parent who’s growing up.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: And the reason is I feel like we are beginning to see research results, presentations of research results that came out of people who came to the conference a few years ago and then did a research project, and now they’re coming back and reporting on their results. Now, I don’t know a hundred percent if all of the presenters that I’m talking about actually came to the conference. But I do know that the university that this particular session is from has supported us in the past with an institutional, so we have some faculty from Gonzaga who are presenting a study on standard-based gradings effect on motivation, anxiety, and understanding, and calculus two. So they did an actual student survey research project. To start to examine the effects, not just on grades, but on motivation, anxiety, and understanding.

Boz: So when is that session?

Sharona: So that session is on day one, and I forgot to write down the timing on that, so gimme a second. It’s day one at the 1:00 PM Eastern Time slot. Now we do have, counter programming in any given session. We have multiple things going on at one time. Slot, just like any conference, but this is by Nicole Barta, Katherine Ulti, Vesta Kal, and Danielle Teague. I apologize if I mispronounced any of those names, but I’m so excited that we’re getting research results coming back to us from work that we’ve done at the conference a few years back. So i’m excited.

Boz: Now, one quick note ’cause you said one o’clock, I wanna make sure all of our listeners know the times that we’re going to be listing are in Eastern standard time, so that’s one o’clock.

Sharona: Eastern daylight.

Boz: Yeah, are eastern daylight not standard, I apologize. Thank you for the correction. But yeah, so there’s a couple of things on day one that I’m really excited about and the first one is. We are bringing back something that we’ve seen in some of our comments over the last two years. We’re bringing back some of the kind of beginner sessions. So, our first couple years of the conference, of course we had lots of these beginner sessions. But we felt we grew out of those. And now we’re bringing a couple of them back. The first one is at one o’clock on that day one by one of the organizing committee members Dr. Ashley Fox. I’m really excited to, to see those come back. There’s also another one at the 2 45 by Adriana Streifer, who’s was part of the alternative grading institute. She’s been, on the podcast. So I’m really excited to see those two things coming back.

Sharona: And like we said, one of the reasons we record everything is because we’ve just mentioned two things that we’re both excited about at the exact same time slot on the exact same day. And there might be more from that time slot that we talk about in a minute.

Boz: Actually, that one o’clock session on day one, in my opinion, is loaded. It’s loaded. One of the other on that same time zone parallel that I always like to hear, I, they usually turn out to be some of the more popular ones, but it’s how to do this in large scale. We’ve got a combined session that’s gonna have a couple of different presentations. One of them is doing this with large coordinated first year courses, something you know a little bit about. And another one is doing it just in a large calculus class. Those kind of large scale things always really popular. It’s always fun to hear some of the innovative ways that some of the alternative graders out there figure out how to do this in these massive settings.

Sharona: And one of those sessions also is talking about how to do it with Canvas. And that leads me to my second thing that I wanted to share about, because getting this done technically is always a big topic, and I’m really excited because on day two, actually in the evening, most likely and more the social hour time. Dr. Stephanie Valentine, who we’ve just had on the pod twice, is gonna be there with some of the folks from Teach Front, and they’re gonna be playing with and demoing and giving people a chance to use the Teach front system. So that’s not officially on the schedule yet. I think it’s gonna be Wednesday night could shift around, but I know they’re planning to come. And so just so much packed into this first set of things that we’re sharing about.

Boz: Yeah. And. Can you give our listeners a real quick recap? What is teach front? Because I think this is so cool.

Sharona: Yeah, so Teach Front is an LMS system that is basically a LMS that came out of a project between Stephanie and her students at the RAKE School of Engineering because they started using alternative grading methods and had a problem with tracking. So she and her students actually came up with a company and a project that’s now like a real life thing to actually design the entire LMS system around alternative grading.

Boz: Yeah, I think it was so cool that it was like a computer design class or something like that to begin with. They were like we don’t have a great LMS system. Let’s find a different way to track this. And yeah, they ended up making a whole, like working LMSI think it was such a great story. And I love that they’re coming here to demo some of that.

Sharona: And if you’re interested, we will put in the show notes the previous episodes we had with Stephanie Valentine. I don’t have them at my fingers.

Boz: Before we get too far into day two, though, there was one other one that. The name of it just sounds interesting to me. I’m really curious about this one. It’s in the 2 45 slot on that day one. I just wanna find out what this course looks like. What is a, yeah,

Sharona: what is social media integration exactly. What is it in biology? I can understand it in a marketing class, but biology. What are we doing with the social media integrating and how does that work with alt grading? I agree.

Boz: Yeah, very.

Sharona: I’m.

Boz: Really curious about that one. So day one, as always, is just loaded and like you were saying there, there’s so many great sessions. What do you do if you can’t go to all of them? Like I said, give us a couple weeks after the conference and we will get all the other ones that you weren’t able to go to posted, so you can go back and watch as many as you want.

Sharona: I agree. I have a couple more for day two. Okay. So we said that day one is packed.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Day two, when you look at it, it looks a little light because we have a big poster session right in the middle of the day. So if you just visually look at the schedule, you’re like, oh, it’s light, but no. No. Day two is not actually light. So one of the things that I am really excited to see is we’ve talked previously about this idea of self-determination theory. I believe that was Brie Tripp and Rob Furrow worked on that.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: Now we’re getting more variety across disciplines. So there is they said here, un grading for an entrepreneurial mindset, a self-determination theory approach to business education. So I don’t remember ever attending a business education talk at our conference.

Boz: That’s a good point. You are right. I don’t either.

Sharona: And it’s very interesting because, and this is something Stephanie talked about, business schools are trying to create entrepreneurial mindsets. They want innovation, they want adaptability, they want risk taking. And the abstract for this particular talk specifies they say traditional grading systems may undermine the varying mindset that they’re seeking to develop. Now what’s interesting is this abstract was submitted before we had Stephanie Valentine back on the pod to talk about the fact that capping these, as at Harvard was gonna destroy innovation, so I’m really excited. Again, this is a research results talk using self-determination theory. It’s a quasi experimental study, so we’re getting validated studies and results. Coming back in.

Boz: Yeah. And in that same time zone on day two, there’s another one that also caught my eye. ‘Cause we’ve been talking, with a few guests in the near past about giving students more determination, more direction, more choice. And there’s another one here of that time zone, a choose your own adventure course design that actually works. The surprising synthesis of accumulation and mastery based grading. So that’s another one that the title seems really interesting. Like I said I love these ideas. We had Chris Sarkonak, did I say his last name right?

Sharona: Sarkonak.

Boz: Sarkonak, sorry, Chris. We had him on in fact he is also gonna be presenting, we’ll talk about that in a minute. But yeah, we had him on and he talked a lot about, the student input and that kind of student direction that he has in his class. So here is another one completely unrelated class that’s doing something similar. So really interested in that one.

Sharona: So I love that we’re getting research results. We’re getting implementation results. Another one that I’m really interested in, which is also on day two, is about building communities of practice. So we’ve talked about this ourselves as well, but from isolation to collaborative innovation, building institutional communities of practice for equitable grading reform. And this is really leading into some of that leadership stuff that we were talking about with Matt Townsley and building communities. I’m really excited to see. This particular presentation where they’re looking at.

Boz: That’s not just a presentation either. That’s an actual workshop.

Sharona: Oh, you’re right. That’s a workshop. This workshop is targeted to faculty, developers, center directors, assessment leaders, department chairs, things like that.

Boz: We actually have a couple of workshops in, in that day two. I love the workshops, not just coming in and hearing what some people are doing, but actually getting to do a workshop, getting a little hands-on stuff, it’s great.

Sharona: Now I do wanna do a shameless plug here for a moment, if I may.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: We’re talking about communities of practice and faculty learning communities. But the Center is actually supporting two upcoming faculty learning communities. So one of them is Drew Lewis and Melanie Lenahan, who are two of our organizers, are restarting their faculty learning community actually before the conference. So we’re gonna put it in the show notes. But if you go to the center for grading reform.org/learning-community. It starts, I think May 5th or so and runs through just before the conference, but it’s a six week onboarding, starting of a faculty learning community about alt grading. And then you and I are doing a faculty learning community that’s on Saturdays starting in August, specifically for math faculty. So through the MAA open math program.

Boz: Yeah. Now, Drew’s is not specific to math, correct?

Sharona: Correct. That the one, that’s through the center directly. It’s a faculty learning community on implementing alternative grading. It’s specifically for post-secondary faculty, so university and college, and two year and four year faculty. It is, you’re gonna work through a scaffolded implementation plan. No familiarity needed, but, maybe a little bit of familiarity with the basics and maybe having chosen a course they wanna redesign.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: So we’re trying to build all those communities.

Boz: All right. So that kind of gets us through day two. What about day three? Is there anything that is catching your eye on day three?

Sharona: So the big thing that caught my eye was the title of Jesse Staal’s keynote. So we have keynotes all three days. Jesse Stommel we haven’t had at the conference for a while, and he was the one that coined the word UN grading. And there’s a lot of conversation about whether or not we want that word. And so the title of his talk is, “Do we need the word UN grading?” And he lays out his philosophy, his thoughts about that word. And its uses or not. So, I love Jesse. We’ve had him on the pod, but it’s like when Susan Bloom came back and it was like five years later after the book came out, or 10 years later. This is sort of Jesse going, okay, I’ve had a journey since the original time, so I’m really excited to, to listen to that one.

Boz: Yeah. This is not something new for them. Yeah. That’s part of the reason we’ve been and I do hope that at some point we’re able to get one or two of their faculty members on here and talk to them more in depth about just what grading and looks like our evaluation looks like without grades, it’s. So excited about that one. So if any of the other organizers are listening to this podcast, let me have this one, please.

Sharona: Nah, they don’t listen to us. Do you have any others on day three that you wanted to mention?

Boz: Yeah, there’s a couple of ones that are student related. There is like the, there’s one of the four o’clock time slots that looking at student agency through, which is done by. None other than

Sharona: our buddy Chris.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: Whose name, whose last name. We’re not gonna say ’cause we can’t remember how to pronounce it.

Boz: We’ve had him on twice in the not too far past. So yeah, that one is exciting. I always love to hear about things from the student side. And then there was one other one that I’m also really excited about at the 2:15, this original portfolio leveraging art practices and alternative grading. As much as we’ve talked about it, we haven’t had a lot of instructors from the arts, whether it’s, performing a visual. So I’m excited to hear about that. We also give a little. Plug for the podcast. We have a performing art interview scheduled in the near future. So yeah, I’m excited about getting this from the electives and the arts side. All right, so that was some of the stuff that I’m really excited about day three. What about you? Is there anything else that is peaking your interest when you look at the schedule?

Sharona: Yes. So as most people know I have definitely been playing with and grappling with the use of AI in general, but we’re starting to see it in grading, like specifically grading, not just, oh, the students are using it. Are we going to use it in our classes to teach? But what about the grading part? And we actually have some sessions that involve that.

Boz: Yeah, a couple of them, in fact.

Sharona: So on day one, we have a panel at 2 45 that’s about alt grading in the ethical use of ai. So that was on day one, that panel about ethical use. On day three, we have, talk called Beyond Detection. Bernard Stigler’s, authentic Thinking as a framework for grading in the age of ai. So that’s how do we grade our classes when the students are using ai? And then there’s a third panel that ties into an article that I just. Red. So the third one is back on day one in that 1:00 PM timeframe. So we’ve now hit every single thing in the 1:00 PM timeframe. There’s a panel about using specifications in writing classes, and although that particular session doesn’t specify in the abstract if they’re gonna talk about ai, looking at the schedule and seeing this article , come across my feed from a Google alert that I set up because of Matt Townsley. I wanted to see if you’d be willing to talk about AI as it specifically relates to either its use in grading or its impact on grading.

Boz: I, yeah I think ’cause we have talked about AI quite a bit and I know. There’s been a few times where you’ve come up and said, where you do use AI and one of the places that you still don’t and you are uncomfortable with, and that has been in the grading or the feedback part. So you were talking about this article you found. There’s another one that I think we’re going to tag team on and it’s this one that came out about. A little over a year ago, but it’s, is it ethical to use AI to grade?

Sharona: Absolutely. So I think if it’s okay with you, we’re gonna pivot now and really dive into these two articles because they’re bringing up a lot of thoughts for me. Yeah. I’d like to start with the article, how AI powered essay grading is Transforming Modern Educational Systems. Okay. This came out a couple of days ago. That’s how new this article is. It’s written by Mark Berman. It’s on a website called programming insider.com, and it’s really looking at the use of AI in essay grading. And the first thing that happened when I looked at this is alarm bells started ringing in my head because one of the things we’ve talked about at universities is how the AI is trained on academic writing. So it is very much about the current cultural norms of the American system of academic writing of what we consider quote unquote good writing. So the other thing that I’ve said in the past is that. The feedback is the most personalized relationship between the instructor and the student.

Boz: Yeah. And that, that feedback is we’ve had done whole episodes on feedback and it is so important that Yeah. I know you have said several times that you are really hesitant to even consider using AI as much as you use AI for a lot of other things. ’cause you really do, you have embraced ai, you’ve seen how much of a time save it can be in, in your job and really trying to personalize some of the assessments to, students interest in things, which is really cool how you’ve done some of that. But yeah, the feedback has always been where you drew the line.

Sharona: Yeah. And just to be clear that one of the reasons I have been using it, for example, I’m doing portfolios and pre-calculus, I was able, the students were able to pick a topic that was very personal to them and I was able to ask the AI with very specific prompting to give me problems that took their topic and made it available in the different mathematical context that I needed it to. And so that was really cool. It stretched my brain, it stretched their brains. But yeah, how do you justify this? But as I started to read this, and I wanna read a couple of paragraphs or sentences from this that talk about the limitations of traditional essay grading and combine that with some experiences I’ve had recently talking to faculty, particularly from R one research institutions.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: So it says here. For decades, essay grading has relied heavily on human evaluation, teachers and educated dedicate hours to reading, assessing, and providing feedback on written assignments in classrooms with large student populations. Providing detailed feedback on every submission becomes difficult. This often results in delayed responses, which can reduce the effectiveness of the feedback. So right there.

Boz: Yeah we’ve talked about pretty much everything that’s brought up. First, that feedback is pretty pointless if it’s weeks later, like one of the key things about feedback is it needs to be specific and it needs to be timely. And you know what? In the original version of the Slam Statistics class, we had a large writing component to that. Literally, my students wrote anywhere from a research report that was anywhere from 15 to 30 pages. That project was a bigger writing assignment than anything they did in their English class. It was a nightmare to grade and I only had, 20 to 25 students. I’m not talking about some of these large writing courses. I don’t know how my colleagues did it. Yeah, this is what this is talking about. That feedback is fairly useless if it’s, if it takes you a month to get it back, but to do it well, how does it not?

Sharona: And in that process. You’ve talked about this before, grading can become inconsistent ’cause you can get tired, you can get interpreting things differently. It can be dependent a little bit on what you know of the student. There’s real issues with inconsistency. And then there’s big differences between grammar and spelling and structure versus the content and the creativity and your perspective and the student’s perspective. So there’s some real limitations and this combines with, i’ve been talking, to a bunch of R one professors recently for some projects I’m on, and their classrooms are even, I think even in their writing classrooms, they can have 50, 75, a 100, 200, 300 students in a single class. So at that point, you’re either offloading your grading to graders who are not you, the instructor. They’re either TAs or sometimes undergraduate students.

Sharona (2): E even if you’re doing that, even if you are, doing it and really trying to be conscious about consistency and you’re doing some collaborative norming and all of these things, it’s still when you have to introduce that many additional graders, that’s still a level of potential inconsistency that’s going to affect the students.

Sharona: Yes. So having AI. Essay grading, if it works, can be fast, it can be efficient, it can be consistent, it can be standardized, which I say that word very cautiously because there are times and places where standardization and writing is important and other places where it definitely is not it. It can be more directly aligned to the learning outcomes.

If you have say, 15 learning outcomes in a writing class that. Bridge across different assignments. You as a human brain, you’re gonna have trouble tracking all 15 against every essay.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Or however many. So AI tools can do that. But these tools, we know, at least today, they’re not necessarily accurate. They have built-in racial bias. They have built in bias towards certain types of writing. So I’m still like and one of the things that I’m struggling with is, I know I just said that these classes are really big. Should they even be?

Boz: That’s a whole nother

Sharona: I know, but am I. Feeding into allowing them to continue to grow if I support or promote AI powered essay grading. Or is it just like inevitable? And so we wanna make it good and we still want writing classes to be alternatively graded with proper feedback loops. I don’t know. I’m conflicted. So that’s some of my initial thoughts on this article.

Boz: I agree. And like I said, I am, we’ve had automated and e even AI grading in like math homeworks and low stake things. And anything that, mathematically does have an actual right answer, like the mechanics of it. And that’s something that we’ve been utilizing for a long time now, not just recently. With ai, it’s improved it because instead of students just going through and finding out what they got wrong and trying to do it again, now they’re getting some AI assistance on those corrections. But we’ve had that for a while. The actual assessment, not the practice. But yeah. I’ve always been real cautious about this, but we were talking about the consistency that ai, if you’re using some sort of AI assisted grading and feedback, you would get. Another thing that this article brings up is not just that kind of consistency, but that the ability to also track the data. ‘Cause we all know, we’ve done data before. If the data isn’t consistent coming in your results and any of your conclusions are going to be skewed or flawed. With this kind of AI assisted, when you’re getting the as, the consistency that data becomes. A lot more important.

In fact, there’s part of this article that talks about this, that this AI powered grading systems, I’m gonna read directly, the AI powered grading system, generate valuable insights based on students’ performance. These insights can help educators identify common weaknesses, track progress, and adjust teaching methods accordingly. Hey, I have been doing data-driven instructions for 20 years. That’s been a core thing of the first school I was at, it’s been a core thing of my leadership as a department chair, wanting to use data to drive instruction. The one flaw with that is if your data, the collection is inconsistent because graders are inconsistent, your conclusions aren’t as powerful. This does. Give a real like tool that instructors can use.

Sharona: And that’s one of the things where, over on the other article the Ethical use of ai,

Boz: ethical Use, yep.

Sharona: There’s a section in here about one instructor who does something that I really like with being able to have both the human and the AI component that has to do with that consistency, right? So one of the challenges with consistency is if you have too many things, like point levels, we’ve proven a million times going back to that. That was it Starch and Watson or whatever you Starch and Elliot. That if you have too many points, too many scales, you can’t get consistency. What this instructor does is she will read a paragraph and assign a score, usually one to four. So you have four levels. Four is, it’s good, one is not there. And. So first thing she does is she doesn’t give any feedback, but in her own notes, she scores the paragraph. She then takes the paragraph, puts it into AI with her own grading criteria, and asks it to score it from one to four. Okay. And gives the feedback. She then decides how to use the feedback, depending on whether she and the AI agree on the score and what the score is. So if the score is a four and she has already, ’cause she does her scoring first. If they both agree, she grabs the AI’s comments, which are usually positive and some nice stuff, copies it in, sends it off, boom. Done.

If she gives the paragraph a two or a three, and again, if the AI agrees with her, she’ll take some of the constructive criticism. But she will also start to integrate her own thoughts, especially when she knows where the AI’s weaknesses are.

Boz: That same thing was brought up in this other article that about using grading or AI to, to grade, and that was the instructor. The human part of this always has, to verify the grade. And has the ability to override it.

Sharona: Yeah. I think what I love most about this example though is that she’s grading first.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Because if you do the AI first, there’s a strong risk of the AI impacting the teacher’s perceptions.

Boz: No. You’re absolutely right.

Sharona: But I agree with you. Yeah, and what she says here is it cuts three weeks time down to one week in her feedback loop.

Boz: Okay. And that’s huge. We were just talking about, the time specificity, a two week difference is a huge difference in our students. Getting that feedback.

Sharona: There’s also, the other thing you can do with a lot of these tools is they’re not, most instructors are not just going out to the general like chat GPT, but there are definitely tools out there that have been designed specifically and walled off, because you have student privacy concerns, you have other things like that, but they’ve been walled off and designed and customized to do this grading. So you can have loaded in your standards, you can have loaded in your grading criteria, you can really customize it. And I definitely know that when I’ve been using the ai, it thinks of things that I don’t think of. Not that I couldn’t have thought of them, because often when I read it, I’m like, oh yeah, duh. But I didn’t think of it.

Boz: Yeah, that, that’s the point. It’s a time saver.

Sharona: And the AI gives a lot more of the feedback than I would, ’cause again, I’m aware of my own fatigue and all those things. AI can give quantity and then I can be the quality control.

Boz: We’ve talked a lot, throughout the run of this podcast about one of the big concerns that, you know, instructors K 12 and higher ed have, when it comes, when we start talking about some of these principles of alternative grading, is the increased amount of time used in grading and we admit, yes, it can be, but one of the things to battle that is utilizing the tools we have available to us it’s at its most effective and efficient ways. We’ve had whole episodes on this whether that tool is, a generator, a, tracking regardless of what the tool is. This is another tool. This is another tool in our toolbox. Is there limitations to this tool? Yeah, there’s limitations to every tool, but I really do wanna, if you don’t mind, and we don’t have to end it here, but I want to read the last line of this article because I think it, which of the first article.

Sharona: The AI powered essay grading.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: Yeah. Okay. Go ahead.

Boz: In a world where education must adapt to increasing demands and evolving expectations, AI powered essay grading stands out as a practical and impactful innovation. Like you have talked specifically, I mean you’ve flat out said it. You have called AI and the changing environment that our students are currently in a, what did you call it? Existential level. Extinction level or

Sharona: Yeah, existential.

Boz: Existential to higher education.

Sharona: Yeah, because one of the challenges is if we persist in teaching our students skills that are better done by computers and now AI. Our students can pick up on that now. Like maybe they didn’t really understand it when it wasn’t so frictionless, but they clearly understand now that the AI is better than they are in most of this stuff. And so it’s very concerning to them. And we have to somehow find a way to focus on the skills that AI might never be better at. And going back to this ethical use article. There is a major concern we haven’t brought up yet so you read that it’s a practical and impactful innovation? The students don’t necessarily agree they’re offended. They think it’s unethical for teachers to use technology to assess their work when they themselves are being barred from using AI themselves. So they feel that it’s a lazy double standard, whether they’re right or wrong, that is their perception of things. And so we have to really come to grips with if it’s okay for us to use it, how is it not okay for them to use it?

Boz: Okay, but that is an argument that we have been dealing with in, in math education for 40 years. ’cause that’s the exact same argument about you know why as an educator can I use a calculator to make my answer keys their check work? And I don’t let my students use calculators. That’s, yes, it’s a much more advanced one now, but we’ve been dealing with that argument in mathematics for a little while.

Sharona: We have, but we didn’t. Use the calculator to assess their work. Yes, we generated our answer key, but we were still the ones comparing the work to the answer key. And I think that what the students are saying here is, this is getting to this idea that assessment is the human relationship, right? Yeah, it is. And so they’re feeling betrayed like we are outsourcing our relationship to the computer. And if that’s the case, then why should they have a relationship with us at all? Why shouldn’t they just go take their classes from a computer?

Boz: Oh, and that’s one of the things, one of the things that the other article brought up, there’s a whole section called supporting educators, not replacing them. And in the middle of that, again, I’m gonna read directly from. Educators bring contextual, understanding, emotional intelligence, and subject expertise that AI can never replace. So I get what you’re saying, but also if we are utilizing these tools to free up our time. So that we can now be more focused on that contextual understanding, on making those connections with our students on that emotional intelligence and connections with our students. Wouldn’t that be a better use of our time? ’cause the AI is never gonna replace that.

Sharona: Yes. If that’s what we’re doing.

Boz: Exactly. Exactly.

Sharona: Okay. And that’s my concern because in these big classes and these R one research institutions, the students already feel like their instructor doesn’t care. How can they, if there’s a 300 person class, how can the instructor care about you as an individual? Unless you’re one of the three people that makes themselves known in a 300 person class, you are just a face and a body. And the one way you used to be known is the, is that the instructor had to read your writing or whoever was doing the grading. So it’s just something I wanna just throw out that caution out there. Adapting these, adopting these. Yes, it has all these benefits of the faster feedback, the more consistency, things like that. But if we allow ourselves to replace what’s left of the human relationship I think that our students are gonna opt out. They’re just gonna be like we’re not even gonna bother going to your college because you guys don’t care about us. And I might as well take one of these massive open. Who cares if I’m in the class of 300 or 300,000?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So it’s not even so much the ethics. Because I think like any other tool, it can be used for good or for bad, and there’s all kinds of other ethical issues with AI. It’s really that can we use it with intentionality that betters our relationship with our students and doesn’t decrease it?

Boz: And you know what? I don’t want anyone to hear my arguments and misunderstand. I am not using AI to grade my stuff yet. I am not to that point. I still have concerns with that, but these two articles, and especially this one about using AI to essay grade is interesting. It brings up some interesting, I think it’s a discussion. I think it’s something that we need to be thinking about and be intentional about. So I don’t want anyone to, think I’m saying that I am doing it or we should, I am saying this is a tool that’s out there now that maybe we should have a little bit more conversation about. Maybe it does have a place in a setting, maybe it doesn’t, but it deserves a conversation.

Sharona: Exactly. And let me be clear, I am not using any AI grading either. I am using AI to generate authentic assessments because I have the skill to give the AI good prompts, but I do not use any AI in grading, and I’m not advocating for it. I just think it’s out there, it’s coming and we need to talk about it, like you said. Yeah. We have to have this conversation.

Boz: We need to educate ourselves. We need to not have the knee jerk reaction of no, that’s just wrong. We need to look at the pros and cons and we need to look at, is it a tool that could make my job as an educator more effective because it frees me up to do other things that the AI can’t do? Or is it just not appropriate for my class in my setting?

Sharona: Exactly. So I actually hope. I’m gonna throw this out there. I didn’t talk to you this about this ahead of time, we have these two evening sort of social hours at the conference. I would love to have this conversation with some interested people in one of those social hours. I think that would be a good place for us to just spitball and say, what do we think of this? Do you know anyone who’s doing it? Have you thought about it? Have you done it? I don’t know. What do you think?

Boz: I think you are right because when you get a bunch of us alternative graders together, there’s a lot of kind of core ideas and beliefs that we agree on, almost universally. AI is the one that we are like, we go the entire spectrum from people going, the absolute 0% doesn’t have any role in, in my job, in the student’s job. To people that are, utilizing it in multiple facets. So yeah, I agree. It’s an interesting, I think the grading conference would be a good place to do it. ‘Cause there are so many different people with different viewpoints and I would love to hear them. ’cause I don’t know, like I said, I wanna have this conversation because I’m not educated enough yet on it. And it’s coming. Like I said, we, we need to have this conversation.

Sharona: And it’s not something that I have to address right away ’cause I don’t have classes of this size, but I know that my colleagues at R one institutions absolutely are having to deal with this right away. So it is one of the barriers to adopting alternative grading is the amount of time the feedback takes. So I would invite also anyone listening if you have thoughts and you wanna come on the pod and share it, either pro or con. Reach out to us through the contact us form and we’ll talk about having you come on. Could be future episodes.

Boz: I would love to. ’cause like I said, this is a conversation that there’s so many different stands in our own community. I really want to hear more about pros and cons. I wanna thank everybody. Real quick before we go, Sharona, we talked a lot about the grading conference and the schedule at the top end of this. Where can people find that schedule? Where can they find registration and everything else about the conference?

Sharona: Yeah, so everything is at our website, http://www.centerforgradingreform.org. Click on the conference links. It’s under events or it’s on the main website. You’ll be able to find the schedule. You’ll be able to find registration.

Boz: You’ll find keynote information that’s been there for a little bit.

Sharona: You can also get to the faculty learning community. That’ll be in the show notes. And it’s also, I believe, under our resources tab for community events.

Boz: All right? And for those that are registered, we look forward to seeing you in June. And for everyone else, thanks for listening. This has been the grading. This has been the grading conference.

Sharona: You gotta leave that one in.

Boz: This has been the Grading Pod with Boz and Sharona, and we’ll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode. By commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.thegradingpod.com, or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.