Students aren't the only ones using artificial intelligence (AI) in college and university studies. Professors and instructors are using AI, too. And professors and instructors are using AI not just for their own research, writing, graphic presentations, and other generative and creative work. They're also using AI to grade student essays. Unfortunately, AI-powered essay grading can impact the fair and accurate measurement of your academic performance. AI essay grading can artificially distort, reduce, and hurt your scores, grades, and academic standing. If you face harsh and unfair impacts from AI-powered essay grading, you need and deserve our skilled and experienced attorney defense representation. Retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team by calling 888.535.3686 or using our contact form now. Let us help you preserve and protect your college or university education.
The Role of College and University Essay Grading
Grading essays is at the very center of a school's mission and a professor's duties. Students can get college and university instruction anywhere, including from texts, videos, online presentations, online tutorials, online services, and classmates, indeed from AI tools themselves. For better or worse, many students effectively teach themselves, with little direct involvement of their professors. Yet the one thing that students cannot do on their own, without their professors, is to assess their academic work for official certification against school and field standards. Students can practice essays and other exams, with practice scores generated from machine systems. However, the actual, final, official, verified certification that students have met school standards must come from the professors.
The Duty of Professors to Grade Student Work
Consider that grading is even in professor contracts. Colleges and universities know how reluctant–okay, lazy–professors and instructors can be to grade essays, especially at the end of terms and semesters when final exams and final papers come flooding in. In those moments, professors routinely estimate the hours that grading 100, 200, or 300 final essay exams and student papers will take. And in fairness, professor essay grading can take days, even weeks of dedicated work, over school breaks when professors are supposed to be recovering, preparing their courses for the next term or semester, and doing their own creative academic research, writing, and other work. That burden is why schools put getting grades in on time so that registrars can release final grades directly in teaching contracts. Failing to grade essays in a timely manner can adversely impact the advancement and graduation of students, and late or absent grading is a terminable offense. And that's another reason why professors and instructors use AI-powered essay grading. They won't get paid unless they get their grades in.
AI-Powered College and University Grading
Just as is true for AI-powered student study tools, AI-powered essay grading is increasingly available and increasingly common among college and university professors, instructors, teaching assistants, administrative assistants, and other staff members. You and other students may or may not realize it, but it's happening. A professor, instructor, or assistant under time or other pressure to get grades in, whether for student or institutional use or both, can easily lead to a simple internet search for AI-powered essay grading tools, where those tools are available for free or a modest subscription price. Popular AI-powered essay grading tools include Essay Grader, Essay Grader AI, CoGrader, QuillBot AI, and Brisk. One AI online journal even ranks the top AI essay graders for college and university professors and staff members. Those top-rated AI essay grading tools include Kangaroos AI, Gradescope, Turnitin Feedback Studio, AI for Teachers, CoGrader, EssayGrader, Smodin, GradeCam, and SnapGrader.
Is AI-Powered Essay Grading Even Fair?
It's ironic that colleges and universities, and their schools, departments, and professors, are banning student use of AI with such self-righteousness and vigor, when professors turn right around and use AI in their own most essential and core work, to evaluate, score, and grade student essay papers. If professors have just one thing, one thing, that they should be doing on their own, without AI assistance, you might rightly think that the one thing is essay grading. The popular higher education journal Education Week acknowledges the debate over whether AI-powered essay grading is even ethical, let alone fair. Yet, prominent colleges and universities like the University of North Carolina are even using AI-powered essay graders for student admissions application essays. Imagine not getting into your preferred college or university because a machine mis-scored your entrance essay.
Oddly, in light of the serious questions over the fairness of professors using AI essay graders, colleges and universities are even publicizing that their professors are grading essays using AI tools, or to put it more accurately, not grading essays, instead having AI tools do it for them. See, for example, this University of Texas at Dallas online article touting the work of one of its professors in developing and deploying an AI-powered student essay grader. The article acknowledges that institutions as rigorous and respected as Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are using AI-powered essay grading tools. The justification includes relieving professors of the burden of grading, improving grading consistency, and eliminating grader mood as a variable.
Does AI-Powered Essay Grading Work?
The University of Texas at Dallas article just cited above appropriately ends with a student complaint that AI-powered essay grading does not take full account of the quality and depth of student work. The article also acknowledges that better AI-powered essay grading of higher-level and higher-quality student essays may be years away. AI essay graders can be relatively useful, consistent, and accurate for basics like spelling, grammar, topic content, and factual accuracy, although even there, AI-powered essay graders have their problems, as the next paragraph explains. But the fundamental issue is that AI-powered essay graders, as helpful as they can be, are conglomerations of engineered logic models. They are not direct, genuine, personal, or human evaluations and thoughts. As powerful as they can be, they are still machines, not professors.
Errors in AI-Powered Essay Grading
And AI-powered essay grading tools make mistakes. They may be engineered, aggregated design mistakes rather than individual mistakes, but they're still mistakes. The errors of AI-powered essay grading tools begin with the very effort to fully standardize the language that students naturally deploy in their essays. Colleges and universities welcome students from around the world, each with their own experience and expression of language and thought. Student-written expressions that may be cultural, personal, or even genuinely creative and original, an AI essay grading tool may score as inaccurate, inarticulate, and erroneous. The very students whom higher education should be encouraging and applauding for their unique, original, personal, and cultural expression, AI essay graders are instead beating down and punishing with lowered grades and scores.
You've likely experienced AI errors, frustrations, and annoyances with your word processor's grammar, punctuation, and spell checker. The small variations between American usages and English usages of the spelling of English-language words can alone trip up AI essay graders. Examples include color and colour, honor and honour, and realize and realise. The AI essay grading grammar and punctuation errors happens with possessives like its versus contractions like it's. But beyond their plain errors, AI essay graders can discriminatorily punish common usages of English as a second language, international, neurodivergent, and provincial students. A professor might, for instance, deeply appreciate the regional expression style and brilliant thought of an Appalachian student who was the first in the student's family to attend college, appropriately scoring the student's essay high, when AI essay grading tools would instead hammer the student's work.
Invoking College and University Procedures
Fortunately, our attorneys can invoke your college or university's procedures to help you challenge your school's misuse of AI-powered essay grading and address and rectify the harms it has caused you. Colleges and universities generally offer the following four procedures or forums that our attorneys can access to address this increasingly common issue.
Relief Through Academic Grade Appeals
If AI-powered essay graders have mis-scored your submitted essay, whether in an essay exam or final course paper, that error may have affected your course grade. Colleges and universities have grade appeal systems, enabling students to challenge the erroneous scoring of their final course exams or papers. See, for example, the University of Minnesota's Grading and Grade Appeals Policy. Our attorneys assist students with grade appeals, both in the substantive analysis of their work and the procedural submission and advocacy of the appeal itself. Proving the adverse impact of AI-powered essay grading can be subtle and technically challenging. Get the skilled and experienced help you need from our attorneys for a convincing grade appeal.
Relief Through Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) Appeals
Likewise, if AI powered essay graders have erroneously scored your essay exam or final paper, affecting your course grade, satisfactory academic progress, and good academic standing, your college or university will likely have a satisfactory academic progress (SAP) appeal process to challenge and correct your academic probation, academic dismissal, or other adverse consequence from the AI errors. See, for example, the Satisfactory Academic Progress Appeal Process at the University of Missouri. As with a grade appeal, an SAP appeal can be technically and procedurally challenging. SAP appeals can also go hand in hand with grade appeals. Let our attorneys assist you with your SAP appeal for relief from AI essay grading errors.
Relief Through Student Grievance Procedures
Colleges and universities also routinely offer student grievance procedures for students to address issues that do not fall neatly within other procedures, like the above grade appeals and SAP appeals. The grievances may go before a school ombudsperson or similar official authorized to take a broader and deeper view of school practices having adverse impacts on students. For example, the University of Tennessee System student grievance procedure. An effective student grievance generally takes more than a scattershot gripe about AI grading. To be successful, your grievance would need to demonstrate the technical errors of the AI grader when assessing your essay exam or final paper and the material impact of those errors on your course grade and academic standing. Our attorneys know how to prepare and present convincing grievances.
Alternative Special Relief Through Oversight Channels
Colleges and universities also maintain oversight channels like general counsel's offices, risk-management offices, and compliance offices, to ensure that school practices do not implicate school accreditation, regulation, liability, and reputation. Our attorneys have strong relationships and a good reputation with college and university general counsel and other oversight officials, to get their attention on matters like inappropriate and harmful AI essay grading. Oversight officials can be keenly interested in addressing errant school practices and correcting student harms before they reach the stage of regulatory review, civil litigation, and public condemnation. We have often been able to obtain alternative special relief through oversight channels, even after grade appeals, SAP appeals, and formal grievances failed. Let us explore your option of special relief through our professional services and network.
Premier Student Defense Services Available
If you have suffered academic or reputational harm from AI-powered essay grading at your college or university, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team to help you address and correct that harm. Your higher education, academic record, and reputation are worth preserving and protecting. Don't let machine grading damage your educational goals and ambitions. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now to retain us to help address and correct your AI essay grading issues. We have helped hundreds of students nationwide prevail in grade appeals and satisfactory academic progress appeals, and with other disciplinary relief. Do not retain unqualified local criminal defense, civil litigation, or transactional attorneys. You need our highly qualified academic administrative representation.
