There’s a robot takeover happening in some American schools. Don’t worry; they’re not the Hollywood anthropomorphic bots that respond in “beep boop.” These ones are far more intelligent, and they’re making teachers’ lives easier.
When Oakland-born educator Sam Anderson-Moxley began building his first essay grading app, he had envisioned a more streamlined workflow for his colleagues. A 2022 study published by the EdWeek Research Center found that teachers spend an average of five hours per week grading papers, totaling 140 hours for a 28-week school year.
Between meager wages and juggling class time duties with out-of-class responsibilities, today’s teachers are on the brink of burning out; 44% of K-12 teachers and 35% of university professors report “frequent” feelings of burnout, according to Soni Agrawal, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Management Nagpur. As a result, more teachers are stepping away from the classroom for good.
Enter Roborubrics, the Google Docs compatible grading software that’s cutting teacher grading times down to mere minutes. Before building the app, Moxley spent a year teaching himself to code. Having become proficient in a variety of programming languages, he finally launched the app in February. Roborubrics is now being used in classrooms on the island of Hawaii, where Moxley is based. His plan is to bring the program to Oakland schools when he relocates back to the city next year.
“It would be a dream to have school districts in the Bay Area using Roborubrics,” Moxley said.
Roborubrics works by reading rubrics and delivering evaluations on academic writing based on their criteria. Once Roborubrics is purchased, a teacher can make their rubric in a document and have the plug-in grade an essay in just a few clicks. The grading comments come in quickly, but not at the expense of quality. Teachers using the software at West Hawaii Explorations Academy (WHEA)—where Moxley teaches—say they are impressed by the depth of feedback that’s being delivered to their students.
“Giving good feedback is not always easy to do, especially when you have a lot of classes or longer pieces of writing to grade,” said WHEA high school teacher Liana White. “So I think it’s good that it takes on such a complicated task.”
White can now have a single student’s paper graded in three to five minutes, whereas before, the task would take her around 45 minutes.
Shortly after the leading AI chatbot, Chat GPT, was launched in November of 2022, it was quickly integrated into academic culture, causing controversy as cheating scandals began to mount in schools across the country. While some school districts have banned the use of AI completely, others are finding ways to incorporate it productively and explore new teaching and learning methodologies.
Roborubrics is one of a growing number of AI applications that facilitate academic grading. Apps such as Chat GPT, GPT-4 and EssayGrader are increasingly being used by teachers as reports of burnout increase. There is no formal tracking for which schools are employing AI and to what extent, but some states are developing guidelines. In California, the Department of Education issued a report outlining responsible use of AI in educational institutions, listing mainly “administrative tasks” such as data analysis, scheduling and lesson planning.
As he continues to expand into new schools, one of Moxley’s selling points is affordability. The cheapest Roborubrics subscription tier is $10 a month, but he plans to have it lowered to $5 a month by the fall. Taking into account the burden educators bear of having to fund classroom supplies, the entrepreneur made it his mission to ensure Roborubrics was as accessible as possible.
But the debut of Roborubrics isn’t without pushback. Some teachers have sour feelings about using AI in classrooms, often saying it lacks the human touch necessary to connect with students over their assignments. A poll published by Forbes Advisor revealed that 62% of teachers’ concerns with AI are around reduced human interaction, while 30% worry about job displacement.
This hesitancy is most common among senior educators, who Moxley says often prefer traditional teaching modalities and are less likely to integrate technology than their younger colleagues. But he believes that these negative attitudes can change as long as people have an open mindset, noting that most teachers he encounters who do not like Roborubrics lack experience with the app or artificial intelligence in general.
“To that, I say, try and push these tools to their absolute limit, be creative and have fun with it,” he said.
Despite the naysayers, Moxley believes in his product, his testimony being the students’ reactions. In addition to having less stressed teachers, he reported that young learners are enjoying the faster feedback on their work. Seeing them so adaptable to the new technology has given him the idea of expanding Roborubrics to a student-facing application, where kids can use the software directly on their own.
“It’s been interesting seeing the students more receptive to it than some of the teachers,” Moxley said. “It’s definitely a generational thing.”
Addressing concerns about job loss, Moxley emphasizes the mission of Roborubrics to work with teachers rather than replace them. The hours he once spent grading are now hours he has available for his students. Plus, he said he feels he can better support them now. Many other teachers at WHEA feel the same way, according to him.
“I became a teacher to inspire and nurture curiosity in my students, not perform time consuming repetitive tasks,” Moxley said. “Thanks to Roborubrics, I can focus on the best parts of teaching.”
Una Burns is a high school teacher at WHEA who embraces Roborubrics in her classrooms. She teachers a variety of subjects in humanities and the sciences, and said she uses the software whenever she can. At first, it was an adjustment, she said, as she’s taught for 20 years without using much technology. But she’s since grown to appreciate the benefits she and her students have experienced.
One aspect of Roborubrics Burns said she admires is the objectivity in grading. Researchers at the University of Southern California in 2021 found that teachers were five percentage points less likely to rate writing samples by a student named “Deshawn” on grade level or above, compared to writing samples by a student named “Connor.” Roborubrics eliminates the potential for these unconscious biases by using strictly the rubric the educator feeds it to grade student work.
“It’s fair and transparent, just an amazing development we’re lucky to have,” Burns said.
As he prepares to return to the Bay Area next year, Moxley is hopeful for the future of Roborubrics. Before he leaves the island of Hawaii, he plans on launching a local professional development event on AI usage for teachers. By next year, he wants to have Roborubrics in 1,000 schools across Hawaii and the mainland. He also wants to pursue a learning sciences and technology design degree at Stanford University, believing it would complement his experience.
Eventually, Moxley wants to see Roborubrics expand, possibly into multiple teacher and student-facing applications that would address complex issues in education. When he thinks about his initial decision to learn computer programming as a teacher with a background in history, he says it’s comical how difficult it was. But it was a decision that gave him back his precious time, and could do the same for teachers nationwide.
“In the end, it was worth it,” he said.
