- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
This year, about 1,400 essays got bizarrely wrong scores and had to be reassessed. You guessed it — a contractor scored them with AI!
The contractor, Cognia, got $36.5 million this year to mark essays, and they did that by just throwing them into the chatbot…
How did the contractor get caught out on this year’s disaster? One third-grade teacher went and checked her students’ essays and saw the bizarre scores. She alerted her principal, who sent it up to the district. In the end, 1,400 essays got remarked.
Looks like there are about 921,180 public school K-12 students in Massachusetts (at least as of 2021-2022). If they all sat the test, that’s about $40 per test. But state standardized testing in my state is only administered in, like, five grades; so probably closer to $80 per test. And that’s generous, because kids don’t have to take it every year if they passed it the previous year, and they also alternate some subjects year to year.
In any case, even $80 is definitely enough that, if I lived in Massachusetts, I’d assume a human was looking at each essay. Insist, even.