Consequences of AI used to set grades

In this year of lockdown, governments around the world canceled year-end graduation exams. The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) opted for using artificial intelligence (AI) to help set overall scores for high-school graduates based on students’ past work and other historic data.

The experiment was not a success. So, what went wrong and what does the experience tell us about the challenges that come with AI-enabled solutions?

In a normal year for the IB, final grades are determined by coursework produced by the students and a final examination administered and corrected by the IBO directly. The coursework counts for some 20-30% of the overall final grade and the exam accounts for the remainder. Prior to the exam, teachers provide “predicted” grades, which allow universities to offer places conditional on the candidates’ final grades meeting the predictions. The IBO will also arrange independent grading of samples of each student’s coursework in order to discourage grade inflation by schools.

The process is generally considered to be a rigorous and well-regarded assessment protocol. And then came Covid-19.

Canceling the exams raised the question of how to assign grades, and that’s when IBO turned to AI. Using its trove of historical data about students’ course work and predicted grades, as well as the data about the actual grade obtained at exams in previous years, the IBO decided to build a model to calculate an overall score for each student – in a sense predicting what the 2020 students would have gotten at the exams.

A crisis erupted when the results came out in early July 2020. Tens of thousands of students all over the world received grades that not only deviated substantially from their predicted grades but did so in unexplainable ways

The main lesson coming out of this experience is that any organization that decides to use an AI to produce an outcome as critical and sensitive as a high-school grade marking 12-years of student’s work, needs to be very clear about how the outcomes are produced and how they can be appealed in the event that they appear anomalous or unexpected. From the outside, it looks as though the IBO may have simply plugged the AI into the IB system to replace the exams and then assumed that the rest of the system — in particular the appeals process — could work as before.

Go to https://hbr.org/2020/08/what-happens-when-ai-is-used-to-set-grades to read more.