The beginning of the end of exams

           The beginning of the end of exams (AI in schools) in 2019, artificial intelligence will start continuously assessing students, making exams increasingly unnecessary. Normally we hear about AI in the context of driver-less cars or Amazon warehouses, but AI in schools is already a reality. Adaptive learning platforms, such as Century Tech, use algorithmic decision-making to deliver lesson content based on a student’s ability and interests.

            Teachers use ‘AI teaching assistant’ tools to optimist seating plans for behavior and learning. Even Ousted, the education regulator, is trialing AI algorithms to predict which schools are likely to fail inspections. Recent advances make continuous assessment by AI not only possible, but practical on a large scale — even for subjects without binary “right” or “wrong” answers. Advances in natural language processing mean that AI can analyse the content, structure and style of prose in an essay.

         Instead of examiners spending hours marking one essay at the end of the year, all essays throughout the year could be marked quickly and independently by AI. Already, 60,000 schools in China (a quarter of the country’s total) are part of an on-going government-sponsored trial in which essays have been quietly marked by an AI algorithm.