Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making headlines every day for one thing or another, and business journalists shouldn’t be afraid to seek out AI stories even if they aren’t on the technology beat. Companies far and wide are constantly finding new ways to integrate AI into their business models to boost their bottom lines.
For inspiration, let’s look at some recent stories highlighting the impact of AI on the business of education.
AI in the classroom
A recent article from The Wall Street Journal showcased how it isn’t only students embracing AI to help them write essays; teachers are also using AI grading tools to “give students faster feedback and more chances to practice” their writing.
Although some teachers find AI assistance useful, others have their doubts on the ability of AI to give quality, constructive feedback on writing. As one English teacher told the WSJ: “I don’t see how such a machine could consider the human element of what would make this person a better writer.”
Many of the companies that are developing AI grading tools, such as CoGrader, note that they are not trying to replace teachers, but rather assist them in the grading process while promoting consistency and fairness for students. However, that assurance has done little to alleviate concerns among teachers – and even legislators.
Concerns of replacement
Several bills have been introduced in state legislatures to protect teachers at different levels from being replaced, including a community college bill in California ensuring that an instructor of record for any class is an actual human being. And it isn’t just college professors who are concerned their jobs will be replaced.
This spring, an email sent to faculty by a dean at Boston University on how to manage classrooms during a graduate student worker strike immediately caused the student union to claim on social media that the university was “suggesting that professors use AI to scab for graduate workers.” Although the email wasn’t directly advocating replacing graduate workers, the suggestion to use generative AI tools to “give feedback or facilitate ‘discussion’ on readings or assignments” in the interim sparked concern among striking workers that they were on a slippery slope to replacement.
Phasing out workers
Although teachers clearly are still essential for motivating students and may be safe from being phased out of their jobs for now, the same can’t be said for other education workers, such as test graders.
The state of Texas decided this year to replace thousands of exam graders for its state-mandated test with an AI scoring system, even though the test now contains up to “seven times more open-ended questions.” Those open-ended questions are considerably time-consuming to score and the Texas Education Agency hired 6,000 temporary graders in 2023, but will only be hiring around 2,000 this year.
The agency is adamant that the program will have systematic oversight from humans, as well as quality control checks to ensure grades match rubrics. They also noted that the program won’t think on its own, but will defer to its original programming rather than learning from its experience from one test to the next.
As noted by The Texas Tribune, this decision could have been financially motivated as it will “save the state agency about $15 million to 20 million per year that it would otherwise have spent on hiring human scorers through a third-party contractor.”
