AI Grading Texas STAAR Test Written Responses Feels Like Pure Hypocrisy

All throughout my time in Texas schools, I was gravely warned against cheating. I took it to heart.

I also remember how deeply bored I was most of the school day, looking out the window onto the crunchy yellow grass of our school grounds. I was daydreaming about topics I actually cared about- history and literature, I was obsessed with ancient Egypt and Rome. I was in a near-literal stupor while an equally bored teacher taught us how to take one standardized test and very little else.

When I was in school, most of the questions on the TAAKS test (now STAAR) were multiple-choice, and we spent literal hours over how to fill in a scantron bumble completely in dark pencil lead. Hours on how to guess the answer if you didn't know it for sure. Remembering how much of my precious childhood was spent on this useless nonsense is deeply depressing to me.

Since my tenure of watching flies buzz around a windowsill, the standardized test Texas public students are forced to endure has changed to have more "open-ended" answers, I suppose these require more intelligence and less random chance than multiple-choice bubbles.

Unfortunately, with a real human answer, there is a real human grader- right? That must be expensive to fund (it has been). And it must take a long time (it did).

Well, that's not a problem anymore. Texas will use AI to grade most of the answers, further proving this test has never been about creativity, humanity, innovation, or independent thought. It's about thinking and answering the way you've been instructed to do, regardless if you learn a different way.

We all know using AI to write a paper is cheating. Is using AI to grade a paper cheating too? I'll let you decide.