Using technology to try and make the role of the teacher less taxing can create other problems. Automated systems to grade school work often mark answers incorrect when in fact they are right. Technology has been a life saver for many this year but there are also some software programmes that can hinder rather than help the education process. This article from the Wall Street Journal points out that “Auto-grading promised to save teachers time but now has many of them spending hours poring over answers to their students’ every assessment and exam—if they’re aware of the grading problems at all”. The problem is in the design of the answers, with bots not being able to recognise a slight variation from the teacher´s original answer and automatically marking it incorrect. Lack of time for training is blamed for these errors but at the end of the day the impact is left on the student who after much hard work is left failing a class. Schools need to ensure that if they are introducing new technology to teachers, they need to ensure that time is dedicated to learning more about this and how best to set up tasks correctly. Finding shortcuts to marking exams is easy if enough training is given to set this up correctly.
