Helping Teachers Make the ‘AI’ Grade

Sam Anderson-Moxley

A former Bay Area teacher has figured out a way to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do a particularly time-consuming part of a teacher’s job: grading. 

Sam Anderson-Moxley used to teach at Bret Harte Middle School in Oakland and elsewhere here on the mainland but now teaches 8th-grade science at a public charter school on the Big Island of Hawaii, along with other subjects as needed. 

He has seen class sizes rise in both states, which are also noted for modest teacher salaries and a high cost of living. With more students to teach, more work is required to just grade all their work in a way that gives them proper feedback to learn more effectively, he said. 

“The problem is that teachers typically work seven hours more than the average working adult per week, and 25 percent of their work is uncompensated, plus they don't qualify for overtime pay,” Anderson-Moxley wrote in an email. “Teacher shortages and high turnover are prevalent across the nation.” 

“Teachers and students deserve better,” he added. 

He thinks he can help with some of that with his new software product, Roborubrics. 

As Anderson-Moxley put it, “It’s made by teachers for teachers. It's a technology that actually makes teachers' lives easier.” 

It does that by cutting way down on grading time, he said. It’s an add-on to Google Docs, but uses the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) engine from OpenAI.

“My innovation was integrating that with the Google Docs add-on,” Anderson-Moxley said.

Using huge data sets of previously graded student work, Roborubrics uses AI to compare specified grading criteria to each student’s assignment.

It automates the application of a rubric, which in education is a grading plan that tries to assign similar evaluations to work of similar quality done by different students working under different teachers. Several rubrics might apply to different aspects of the same student assignment. 

“I told my students at the start of this school year that I had a teaching assistant, and it was a robot,” Anderson-Moxley said. “I was surprised how readily they took to this. I think they’re somewhat familiar with AI already.” 

The students made it clear, though, that they wanted continued close contact with a human teacher they knew personally, he said. Still, they appreciated the quick and detailed feedback they got from the AI.

Anderson-Moxley’s school, the West Hawaii Explorations Academy, has adopted the system, and he said most of his teaching colleagues there found it a big help. Several offered testimonials for it on the Roborubrics website. 

“We’ve found it works very well for classes like English and history that have a lot of written assignments, and it also works well in science. It’s still being improved to be better for math,” he said.

Anderson-Moxley is spreading the word of Roborubrics by word of mouth, which can be a little easier in Hawaii than most states because it’s made up of islands. He also plans to discuss it at teachers’ conferences and conventions, such as the Teaching for the Future conference held annually in Honolulu. He welcomes interest from the mainland.

Teachers or schools interested in Roborubrics can visit its website at www.roborubrics.com, where they can view a demonstration of how it works or email the company at support@roborubrics.com. Demonstrations are also available on YouTube.