Auto-Grading Systems Are Getting It Wrong and Causing Remote Learning Headaches

even if it's just a capitalization discrepancy. Julie Jargon, family and tech columnists at The Wall Street Journal joins us prout. These auto grading systems are causing some headaches. Thanks for joining us, Julie, Thanks for having me. I wanted to check in on how everything is going with all this

remote learning that's going on right now because of that pandemic. Julie, you actually wrote an article about how in a lot of cases, bots are grading the schoolwork and quizzes for a lot of students in some of these online classrooms, and a lot of times they're actually getting it wrong. They're marking answers that are right incorrectly, and it has

to do with very simple type of corrections. But either way, kids are coming home with lower grades things like that, and then parents on the flip side have to contact teachers and try to get everything squared away. Julie, help us walk through some of what's happening. I only discovered this because my son, who's doing remote pole, he studied really hard for a science exam. He expected to do well I thought you would do on it, and then we found out he had a very low grade on it.

So I just opened into the test online to see the questions he'd missed, and I found several questions where he did answer the question correctly, but he was marked wrong because his answer that they typed in contained capital letters, where the way the teacher input it into the answer

key it was lower case. So there were several things like that that I discovered between him and my other kids when I went back to kind of look at what was going on here, and then I also create a bunch of other parents to see if they were

discovering similar issues, and they were, Yeah. It's like when you're entering a password for your email logging or something, and it always says don't forget the password is case sensitive, so you have to type in the exact upper case and lower case combination the right way, and that's exactly what was happening. You even had a few screenshots in your article about what was going on, and one of the questions was something about certain plants have special tissues

that move sugar, water and minerals between plant parts. And the answer is vascular plants. But when the teacher inputs the answer, you know, she had a capital V for vascular and then a lower case P for plants, and if you put it, I think in the example here, both the V and the P were capitalized and because of that they got the answer wrong. So tell us about what online system that they were using there, and

a little bit more about how these answers are inputed. Yeah, and that was actually an example from my son's tested the screenshot of that. Menis teacher went back in what they told him and gave the point for it. So he and my other kids are using their school stricts to using a system called Canvas, which is pretty one of the big online school platforms a lot of districts

and colleges are using. There's another educational software company called Otis that also has auto graded as a feature in online classroom So what they are doing is they are relying on these kind of autograding systems, which were I

think build as a way to save teachers time. But what it's doing instead in many cases is requiring teachers to then go back manually through all of these tests for all of their students and make sure that they're getting credit for the answers that they do are down correctly. I want to give one more example, because these are very simplistic. I mean, if somebody was grading this manually, you can see where they would get it right. What

happens when magnets come in contact with other magnets. So the incorrect answer that was put in there was they pulled together or they repel, But the correct answer, as the teacher would have inputed it, was the attract or repel each other. So just these very little, minor, minor differences are causing kids to get the answers wrong on these quizzes and other schoolwork like that. So what has been the response by teachers and the company as well?

Because you spoke to representatives from Canvas, the Canvas acknowledge that this is an issue. They said that they are aware of it and that in fact they frequently received questions about this and you know, complaints about it from teachers,

and they're aware of it. They have a quiz system that kind of their older version of their quiz system that seventy of their customers are still using, and about eighteen months ago they began rolling out an upgraded quiz feature that will recognize answers when they are close enough to the answer that the teacher put in the quiz.

So they are trying to make improvements overall to their online quizzing, but the majority of their of the customers are still using them the older version with these mistakes happening and its exact matchesn't And part of what they said too was that in the rush to do all the remote learning, teachers didn't have enough training also on how to do some of this, So they were also putting it on lack of training for teachers too. Obviously, school districts last spring and just were kind of caught

off guard by the sudden switch. And while they did have more time over the summer to prepare for this fall, who's still a big learning curves I would imagine for teachers to learn the new systems, you know, the online grading. It's not just online grading, it's the whole platform of where you submit, where you post your assignments, where you have your zoom links for the kids classes. All of those things are kind of in one place, and that's

a lot of to learn how to navigate. So it could very well be that, you know, in many cases, teachers didn't have enough time to fully understand that this could be a problem. I mean, I know some teachers are aware of it, others don't know about you know, because it's it's easy to miss if your student has one or two answers wrong. I mean, if the most of the quiz is multip choice and just a couple of writing answers, and they get those wrong, they're also going to be or maybe a CE on a test.

You may not think that's anything to worry about, but if enough of those kind of add up, the student might get a family in grade versus a passing grade, or a C in a class instead of a B when they deserve that B or a day. And even some of the teachers you spoke you said, you know, it's taken them hours to grade these automatically graded quizzes, so you know, it just creates a big headache. So I'm glad to see that they're at least rolling out

improvements to try to correct some of this stuff. But yeah, as a parent, you know you gotta watch out for this and bring it to the teacher's attention if something is a miss like that. Julie Jargon, family and tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm oscar A Mirrors and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out

on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow us and I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast. FA