Grading papers is one of the heaviest tasks in the teaching profession. Essays, long-answer history questions, and reflections: it's an enormous load, especially in high schools where groups are often full. The arrival of artificial intelligence in educational tools, like the one integrated into Scolaro, raises a direct question: is it a useful tool, or a threat to the teacher's professional judgment?
What AI Grades Really Well
AI excels in anything repetitive and standardized. Specifically, for your papers:
- Identifying spelling, grammar, and syntax errors.
- Detecting sentences that are too long, ambiguous phrasing, or missing words.
- Verifying the presence of certain expected elements (introduction, thesis, logical connectors, etc.).
On your teacher interface, you can activate AI-assisted grading for written productions. The system flags errors, offers suggestions, and generates a first level of comments. Students can even see this draft feedback before submitting their final version to you.
What AI Should Not Decide Alone
Where your role remains indispensable:
- The quality of argumentation and the relevance of examples.
- Understanding complex literary texts.
- Interpreting historical documents or the nuances of a position.
In other words, AI helps you with "how it's written," but you remain in charge of "what is said." With Scolaro, you can set clear rubrics and use AI to fill some boxes (language, structure), while keeping control of content-related criteria. You can always adjust the suggested grade.
Objectivity, Consistency, and Time Savings
Another advantage: AI applies the same rubric identically for everyone. It doesn't grade differently at 10 PM on a Friday night because you are exhausted. This reduces variations related to fatigue or mood.
Scolaro allows you to define your rubrics once and then reuse them across multiple groups and assessments. The "language" part of the paper can be graded automatically according to this rubric, ensuring consistency from one group to another. You can honestly tell students and parents: language is judged with a stable rubric, supported by an AI tool, and you then intervene on what requires human judgment.
A Concrete High School Example
Typical case: A 500-word argumentative essay in 10th grade.
- Students submit their text via the student portal (https://scolaro.ca/students) or the Scolaro iOS app.
- The AI analyzes spelling, grammar, punctuation, and basic structure.
- A report is generated for each student (number of errors, types of errors, suggestions).
- You then read the text with this report in hand and focus on the strength of the argumentation.
Instead of spending 15 minutes per paper correcting every comma, you can spend 5 minutes reading and judging the substance, knowing that the language has already been thoroughly checked. On a hundred papers, the time saving is obvious.
AI grading is neither cheating nor abandonment of the profession. It is a way to delegate mechanical parts to free up time for what makes you irreplaceable: your professional gaze, your ability to understand your students, and your capacity to help them progress. Scolaro offers this assisted grading in the specific context of the Quebec curriculum, with rubrics configurable by the teacher. The tool remains a tool; you keep the wheel.