Little Bobby Tables has a pretty good point here. Isn't it true that standardized testing has relied on computerized grading for at least 40 years? I recall taking the ITBS in Catholic School and, in those days, our digital overlords were so strict about the way we marked our sheets. We required special punch-card shaped forms. We absolutely required a #2 Pencil and this was drilled into our heads along with our parents who purchased #2 Pencils or we would be tarred and feathered. We were strictly forbidden from coloring outside the little ovals or boxes with our pencils. We were drilled on exactly how to erase and how to fix up mistakes in every case. We were instructed on whether guessing was encouraged or penalized.

It was not uncommon for a kindly, well-meaning Sister to slightly nudge a struggling student toward a correct answer, though it never happened to me personally. Yes that's right -- when you standardize testing, the teachers become the cheaters, because they have a vested interest in seeing students excel and driving up their institution's own rankings.

In fact my very recent student career was rather dismaying, because I encountered more than one teacher who was more than willing to cross a line and help a student into a better grade than what they could earn on their own. I didn't think it was fair, that I worked my ass off for grades and teachers would just basically join in the cheating. In fact, I tanked a grade in one class because I was incensed about the teacher's behavior. I blew up some important coursework and I directly, sternly told him not to fix up my grade. It was only a "B" but I was so pissed, at that point!

In the end, all our cards were sent off, literally to Iowa, I guess, and fed into giant A.I. machines and graded without human intervention. But our results were very human indeed. I have no reason to believe that our digital overlords failed to grade our S.A.T.s in the same manner, but the regime was slightly looser as we progressed through high school.

In a way, you can say that I lost my job to A.I. in 2024, because indeed I was tasked with grading student submissions, and by the time I was resigning about half of our workload was turned over to auto-testing multiple-choice quizzes and such that would be scored in the LMS itself.

While I personally rarely determined blatant A.I. usage to solve our homeworks, plagiarism was rampant and students were constantly copying from a very small pool of solved homeworks that were publicly posted. Some more savvy students paid a subscription for a cheating website that would provide even more content to them.

But indeed, if educators have relied so heavily on A.I. to produce and grade materials on our end, I suppose it was only a matter of time before turnabout is fair play.