The STAAR exams, which test students between the third and eighth grades on their understanding of the core curriculum, were redesigned last year to include fewer multiple-choice questions.

According to a slideshow hosted on TEA’s website, the new scoring system was trained using 3,000 exam responses that had already received two rounds of human grading.

Some safety nets have also been implemented — a quarter of all the computer-graded results will be rescored by humans, for example, as will answers that confuse the AI system (including the use of slang or non-English responses).

While TEA is optimistic that AI will enable it to save buckets of cash, some educators aren’t so keen to see it implemented.

The attempt to draw a line between them isn’t surprising — there’s no shortage of teachers despairing online about how generative AI services are being used to cheat on assignments and homework.

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