Focus at Four: TEA discusses computers grading students STAAR written answers
BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – Students are in the middle of the state’s STAAR testing this week.
In the past, these written answers have been hand-graded by individuals, but now they will be graded automatically by computers.
Jose Rios with the Texas Education Agency joined First News at Four on Monday.
He said that the engine uses samples selected by educators and TEA staff and uses the patterns of the writing samples to create an algorithm.
Because the way the responses are being taught is changing, he said the way they grade them needs to as well.
“Now that these responses are more aligned with the practices that teachers do in daily activities in class, but they also require a little bit of effort to score, so including automatic scoring engine as part of our whole scoring process allows the process the scoring of the responses faster and also allows us to be good stewards of public funds without needing to incur in additional costs,” Rios said.
He said this is not like Chat GPT. He said concerns over the change can be helped with transparency.
“We have already posted several resources that explained how we have incorporated the automatic scoring engine into our process and we have also released some technical reports on the studies that we conducted to ensure that Texas was ready to roll this,” Rios said.
There is a safety net for the scoring system.
“There is a very strong system of quality control for the whole process. For starters, 1/4 of their responses go through an audit process, which means that it’s they’re backread by professional human scores but on top of that, even at the end of the scoring process when we report the results, districts can request for open-ended responses to be rescored,” Rios said.
