The prospect of artificial intelligence replacing humans in marking exams is “miles away”, Ofqual’s chief regulator has said.
Speaking on the theme of digital exams and the role of AI in assessment at a conference this afternoon, Dr Jo Saxton said that AI could definitely have a “role in quality assurance” in terms of checking human marking, but that its use to solely mark papers is “miles away” because it isn’t “anywhere near as accurate as human marking”.
Her comments came after she used her speech at the Festival of Education today to reveal the results of a survey of parents and teachers on their attitudes to the prospect of screen-based exams.
Ofqual had previously launched a “competition” aimed at “AI experts” challenging them to come up with a system that could mark exams.
Speaking today, Dr Saxton said that she had used a chatbot to look into the role AI could play in assessments, and the “risk list seemed to be longer than the uses list”.
She said the AI identified a list of potential uses including setting questions, adaptive testing and using AI tools to monitor on-screen exams.
However, she said it came up with a longer list of risks that could be summarised into “clusters of issues related to fairness, accuracy, privacy and even costs”.
“My role as chief regulator is to strike the balance between advantages of digital technologies and awareness of its dangers,” she said.
Parents think online exams four years away
Dr Saxton said the regulator had carried out research into attitudes towards screen-based exams among parents and students.
She said just one in five of both groups said they thought assessments should move to full digital papers, while nearly half (48 per cent) thought there should be a mix of paper and digital exams.
And 43 per cent of parents and students said they thought any online assessments were four to five years away from being ready to be introduced.
Last week, Dr Saxton told MPs on the Commons Education Select Committee that Ofqual and the Department for Education had launched a feasibility study into what it would take for “high-stakes exams to go fully digital”.
She said this study was considering what national infrastructure would be needed and what “guardrails” needed to be in place.
The Ofqual chief regulator told MPs that technology could be used to produce adaptive interactive questions, which could mean students did not have to sit tiered exams. She warned that this would be resource intensive and said it would need a large number of questions for the assessments not to be predictable.
