[Anchor]

There is a review of introducing descriptive and essay-type questions to the CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test), along with having artificial intelligence grade them.

If AI is going to grade answers, could problems arise? Reporter Jeong Banseok took a descriptive test himself to find out.

[Reporter]

This is a high school in Gyeonggi Province that uses AI for grading performance assessments.

With the school's permission, our reporting team attended a class alongside the students.

[Lee Yoon-gyu / Science Teacher, Pyeongtaek Cheongbuk High School: Let's learn about the conditions under which fossils are formed.]

After solving a descriptive test question with first-year students here, we will have it graded by AI.

Once the completed answer sheet is scanned, it automatically recognizes the handwriting and finishes grading in less than a minute based on the grading criteria pre-set by the teacher.

Final score adjustments are up to the teacher.

[Lee Yoon-gyu / Science Teacher, Pyeongtaek Cheongbuk High School: The first reason was incorrect. AI judged it as 4 points, but I think I would give it 3 points.]

Out of a possible 10 points, the reporting team received 7 points, and the students received 8 points.

There is an advantage of being able to reduce the time spent looking at some students' messy handwriting.

[Lee Yoon-gyu / Science Teacher, Pyeongtaek Cheongbuk High School: It used to take all day just to grade. Now, grading one class takes anywhere from a short 30 minutes to an hour at most. Now, it even reads graphs and tables.]

Answer sheets graded by AI in schools under the jurisdiction of the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education have reached 3.37 million cases over the past year.

However, the results of a survey targeting 105 teachers revealed a problem: even for the same answer sheet, the scores changed every time AI was made to grade it.

Because of this, teachers gave lower scores to the consistency and reliability of grading compared to other items.

There are also concerns that it could fuel private education.

[Kim Hee-jung / Spokesperson, Teachers' Union Federation (High School Korean Language Teacher): The level where context or background knowledge is involved is definitely not something AI can grade yet. Above all, there are a tremendous number of complaints in school fields regarding descriptive and essay-type assessments. People bring in doctoral dissertations from private academies and ask why one thing is accepted while another is not...]g

The National Education Commission is considering introducing descriptive and essay-type questions to the CSAT as early as 2032, with the stance of going through public deliberation first.

Although AI technology will advance in the meantime, building trust among students and parents is cited as the top priority task, given that hundreds of thousands of people take the CSAT simultaneously and admissions are decided by a single point margin.

(Video by Joo Yong-jin | Video Editing by Kim Jin-won | Design by Kim Min-young)