Case Study 6
Red Pens Retired: AI Takes over Essay Evaluation for a Leading EdTech Company

Revolutionizing essay grading with scalable, AI-powered assessment

The Question: Was there a way to tackle these grading challenges that would elevate the students' learning experiences without taxing faculty members?

Manual grading consumed significant faculty hours, reducing their capacity for higher-value instructional activities.
Slow feedback cycles negatively impacted students' ability to learn and improve.
Variations in grading across evaluators raised fairness and consistency concerns.
Essays lacked structured insights to drive curriculum development or instructional strategy.

About the Client

The client, a leading education technology company focused on creating innovative solutions for personalized and efficient learning experiences across all grade levels, required a scalable and efficient solution to tackle the challenges of grading essay-based formative assessments. Their manual approach was hindering both faculty productivity and student learning outcomes. Key challenges included:

The Answer

AI-powered Grading: Deployed advanced AI technologies (GPT-4 and Claude 3) to provide rubric-based automated scoring and detailed narrative feedback.
Seamless LMS Integration: Linked the scoring engine to the client’s Learning Management System (LMS) through APIs for a smooth user experience.
Feedback Loop for Learning: Enabled AI to support both instantaneous feedback for students and continuous improvement insights for educators.
Actionable Analytics Dashboards: Transformed essay data into structured insights to highlight key student learning trends and areas for improvement.
Faculty-in-the-loop Option: Added a manual review option for high-stakes assessments to balance automation with human oversight.

To address these challenges, the client implemented an AI-powered Essay Scoring Engine that redefined the approach to essay assessment.

The Outcomes

The introduction of the AI-powered Essay Scoring Engine generated significant improvements.

80% reduction in grading time freed faculty to focus on mentoring, coaching, and content innovation.
Immediate feedback helped students improve their performance more effectively, accelerating learning cycles.
Scoring became transparent and standardized, fostering consistency and greater trust in the process.
Surfaced actionable data from essays to inform curriculum adjustments.
Positioned the client to scale their offering within their expanding online programs.

The client transformed essay assessments into efficient, consistent, and insightful processes that enhanced faculty productivity and accelerated student learning, setting a gold standard in formative assessments within education technology.