16. September 2025
An open letter about AI grading children's essays
I learned via this report (https://www.nbcboston.com/investigations/ai-grading-massachusetts-mcas/3807392/) that the essays in the MCAS are being graded with AI, and that it has graded at least 1,400 essays incorrectly. And that is only the grading that was obviously wrong and discoverable. There are likely more undiscovered critical mistakes.
It is unsettling that my kid’s essays and other kids’ essay are being evaluated by models that have no real understanding of writing. They use statistical methods to find correlations between sequences of symbols and past scores, without understanding anything. This punishes individuality in addition to just plain not working.