AI School Report - Ok or not Ok?

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Dc came home with Her School report yesterday, she's in Year 2 (6yr old). The opening statement was long and very professional written, lots of complex language and descriptive words. DB (her uncle) was there when I was reading it and said straight away it's AI written. We put it into an online research tool and it came back as 100% generated, with no personal touches added whatsoever.

AIBU to be upset?

For the record, DNieces also came home with theirs which was very obviously personally written and what you would expect from a Primary School Report.

Even if it is AI they need to give it something to work with. They will be inputting personal details in to the AI engine and it will spew the output in a nicely presented format. So it's not like they just press a button and it's all done

Still a bit lazy though but I guess if you have dozens to write it's understandable.

Actually, this year were probably more personalised using AI, than previous years where I've had to copy and paste because it's impossible to do in time otherwise.

Reports are there to let you know about progress. A lot of children in the class will have made similar progress as they have covered the same curriculum, so general comments can be used and still be accurate.

For example all children will fit into the categories well below expected, below, expected, above or well above.

AI won't be used to make up a load of random facts, but could be to organise and group comments, so you get a real picture of where they are for different things like maths, English, science...etc

AI can generate the whole range of level descriptors across the curriculum to help teachers select statements about individuals which match, as it's just a bank of information.

The teacher still knows the child and where they're up to (and the other 29) but there's some consistency in format and structure.

And many schools have a policy that you don"t waste parents' eves and reports telling parents what their kids are like, as they know and it's not a character judgment. It should be attitude to learning, progress and attainment.

DDs primary report definitely written by teacher.

Other DDs secondary report... its just numbers! One for attainment, one for effort.

No of course not - the headteacher reads through all of the reports before they are sent out so it’s their responsibility to decide if the reports are acceptable.

I did however have a look at the AI to see what it could do and put in a few phrases about more challenging behaviours and it was very good at rewording it but I agree with OP that it was very impersonal, formal and more for an adult.

Can posters please be aware that the vast majority of schools allocate 0 zero hours to report writing.

In most school every second of report writing time (and it takes between 25 and 30 hours depending on the school) is in the teacher's own private time.

Calling us lazy for finding ways to reduce that burden is not on.

Do you believe everything you find on the internet? What are your qualifications to conclude that it's ai generated? Considering that it's a problem the finest minds in computing are struggling with.

If the teachers are feeding personally identifiable information into the AI prompt, or getting it from a spreadsheet etc, there are huge GDPR concerns. And anonymising data and then personalising it takes forever to do properly. The free versions of AI engines hoover up all the information they are given. (Some paid versions promise not to use input to improve their model.)

I used to work for a company that wrote report writing software.

Yes, the reports were 95% push button, but they were based on what the teacher filled in all year about the child.

E.g. same bit of preamble about what was being studied. Then auto-generated text about what the child had done well/needed to do next. Then a couple of sentences about what the child enjoyed/struggled with/was proud of etc.

Instead of taking hours writing down things that any parent worth their salt should have already been engaged with throughout the year by talking to their child, they could focus on the important stuff.

At least good teachers would, and bad teachers wouldn't. You will get them everywhere, regardless of what systems they use.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

👏👏👏

But, again, I feel it is a bit of chicken and egg situation. I was married to a teacher and he spent most of his free time writing reports, schemes of work and all the other bits of useless paperwork for ofsted instead of actually being able to focus on teaching.
And don't get me started on inspections who focused less on how engaged the children were during the lesson and more on how the activities weren't switched up every 5 minutes and how IT skills and numeracy were not introduced as part of an English lit lesson. But somehow didn't mind that an English Lit teacher was substituting for a maths teacher even though he could barely get a handle on long division.

Don’t be ridiculous.
Prompts are things like write a report on a 9 year old who is meeting writing expectations can do a b c ability to x is exceptional. Female pronouns 100 words
then you copy past putting child’s name at the start.

Not all reports use a comments bank. I'm a teacher and have personally written mine every year. Especially the general/personal comment at thr end.

It doesn't. As I mentioned up thread, I generate AI reports at work. All I need to do is to ask AI to generate repost fro Mr X and then go in a fill in Mr X's name, DOB and medical information which takes 10 minutes instead of an hour.
Child's performance in a subject is not identifiable information according to GDPR.

I was a secondary teacher and I taught whole year groups so report time meant I could be writing 150 reports in one go.
You don’t even want to know how long that took, with a teaching timetable and marking/planning aswell…

AI wasn’t a thing but I did have a personally written Outstanding, Good, Needs improvement report that I would copy and paste in as required and then change names and add little personalised bits.
It massively reduced a ridiculously long job.

You'll drive yourself mad if you try to correct everyone on here who yells gdpr at anything they don't like.

That's not how GDPR works.

I'm just saying what we were told by our SLT. By default our school database, where we record grades etc, includes a lot of extraneous information which IS identifiable. It would take take and some IT skills to strip it out. The situation might be different elsewhere.

That just means your AI prompt wasn't clear enough. You need to include the age of the child, the purpose of the report, the tone, the reading age level/style, etc.

When your prompt is right, you won't tell the difference between AI and human.

What data? We're talking about the teacher comments, not the table (or whatever format the school uses) for grades. First name only is absolutely within GDPR rules.

Reports are for adults though. They are for the child’s parent, not the child. I’ve had all the conversations around progress and effort with the child in person in the classroom week in, week out.

ah so shit head and shit teacher

When we write reports, we comment on test and homework results. It would be all too easy to dump the database page for a class into a spreadsheet and feed it to an AI. I'm perfectly willing to accept that this might not be a real problem, but it's something we were warned against.

This

just a thought, surely it would be better for teachers to dictate a 2-3 minute report verbally then use AI to do speech to text and tidy it up? At least then it is personalised and accurate.