Creepy AI Will Look Up a Teacher's Info to Predict What Grade They'll Give a Paper

Grammarly introduced an AI Grader agent that offers students personalized feedback and predicted grades by using publicly available instructor information and uploaded rubrics. Students can input an instructor's name, institution, and class while uploading a grading rubric, which the AI examines to tailor feedback. The AI claims to review public teaching information and identify grading priorities before presenting a predicted score. The approach raises privacy and surveillance concerns because it seeks instructor data to generate predictions and produces feedback that critics say can feel generic despite the claimed personalization. Grammarly also markets complementary tools for educators.

Gone are the days when Grammarly was just a helpful little spellchecker. Presently, it's capitalizing on the AI hype cycle as much as anyone else, and on Monday, it announced a new suite of AI agents for students that will definitely raise a few eyebrows. As spotlighted by The Verge, Grammarly is now offering an "AI grader agent" that provides a student with personalized feedback on their assignment and even claims to predict what grade they'll get.

"AI Grader is designed for students who want to predict how their work will land with their instructor and take control of their grades," reads a page on Grammarly's website. The details on how it gathers this information are vague, but in a video example provided by the company, a user fills out a menu with the instructor's name, their institution, and the class they're teaching. The user also uploads a rubric, which the AI examines to tailor its feedback, according to Grammarly.

"Looking up your instructor," the AI says. "Reviewing public teaching info. Identifying key grading priorities." Then the bad news hits: "Predicted grade 78/100." It's an alarmingly invasive way to get feedback on your work, even if the AI isn't able to "look up" all that much about a teacher (and if it is, then it's even worse.) In short, it's the principle of the thing that's so ugly: is it really necessary to automatically surveil your instructor just to get feedback - displayed under the label "The professor may say..." - that sounds pretty generic anyway?

Read at Futurism