NZQA: AI-marking now a reality
NZQA is implementing AI-marking for all Year 10 written assessments from this year onwards, following successful trials.
During scrutiny week at Parliament, NZQA chief executive, Dr Grant Klinkum, confirmed that Year 10 students who sat their writing assessment this year are having their papers marked by an AI tool.
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Dr Klinkum was questioned by the Education and Workforce Committee on Wednesday 18 June, last week, as part of “scrutiny week”. When asked about NZQA’s use of AI to mark exams he said:
“During May there were around 185,000 literacy and numeracy assessments completed. Around 60,000 of those relate to writing. We are doing a first AI run-through with those writing responses, and 40 percent of those are being human check-marked at the boundary.”
He clarified that students who come close to passing or failing the writing assessment criteria will have their results checked by a human marker.
Dr Klinkum reminded the committee this system was based on a pilot version of the AI marking tool trialled last year with 36,000 written responses. There were smaller pilots of the AI marking tool in the two preceeding years.
“The agreement rate by using AI marking is very, very similar to the human-to-human agreement rate. The combination of AI marking plus 40 percent of check-marking gives us an extremely high agreement rate, far higher than human-to-human.”
This is the first year that AI marking is no longer in its trial-stages but is being used as a live-tool.
Year 10 students who sat their literacy and numeracy assessments in May will receive their results in early Term 3.
In April, Dr Klinkum said the use of the automated marking tool would allow NZQA to return results faster.
“This enables us to return those assessments to schools and students earlier so that they’ve got an opportunity to prepare for the next assessment a couple of months later if they have failed the writing assessment first time round.”
