Does your child's school use AI marking?

[BluePenguins]

My child's school have informed us that after they came back from the Christmas holidays all students from year 1-6 have completed a writing assessment which will be uploaded to a something called a comparative judgement app and marked by AI and give their next steps.

I could see it perhaps being useful at secondary age when they write extensively but I'm really not sure how this can be as useful as the child's actual teacher marking the work. Especially at KS1 age when the handwriting and spelling can be unclear.

I appreciate AI is increasingly common but is this something that is now standard in primary schools, am I out of touch?

It's probably a trial being run by one of the major data companies (had a similar email to deal with at work recently). It's not the same as the work the teachers mark and may provide very useful data in the future that will benefit children including yours.

They said it's something they had brought into a package or something so unfortunately it doesn't sound like a trial.

They were not very clear or forthcoming with much more information sadly. I do appreciate this won't be the only way of marking but it sounds like the main purpose is to give them their next steps which surely should come from their teacher who sees all their work not just this one piece of writing?

That's exactly what I was referring to. One of the big edudata companies are conducting this trial assessment as an optional free add-on to the service their school customers have bought into. Teachers are great, but they don't have access to nationwide trends or the ability to drill down into attendance, age to the month, sex, geographic area, type of school, percentages of disadvantaged, EAL or SEND students, etc, whereas the data companies do.

Over the long term, it is possible that it could be used to improve tracking, estimates, identify needs and ensure fewer children slip through the cracks - after all, a progress measure and estimations built purely upon a single reading and a single maths KS2 SATs result (the current status, the grammar, punctuation and spelling, plus science, aren't used in government measures) isn't broad enough, imo.

It's nothing to do with the class teacher being eliminated from assessments.

Yes i think at KS1 is a bit too young, but id understand them getting AI marked homeworks for gcse level maths, as i feel like they need extra support and feedback, and if these platforms offer it, at least it helps our childrens education..

I’m a teacher and I don’t use AI to mark as I feel like I need to see what my students do to understand where they are. However, there is also a finite amount of marking one person can do, and therefore once AI marking works well, it will have its uses. I mark an essay-heavy subject, and while it would be fantastic for all students to write and have feedback on an essay per week, say, this just isn’t feasible across a number of classes. So I sometimes say they could write a practice essay and feed it into an AI chat with the criteria and get instant feedback. That doesn’t really help me because I miss out on knowing what they’ve done but it does mean the student gets something extra because they can do that between assessed pieces if they want more.

I tried it and it look me just as long to scan and upload the work and then print out the feedback that I’m just going to write it myself next time!