The Perfection Next® Grading Assistant uses Generative AI to assist teachers with grading and providing feedback to Long Essay Questions (LEQs) and Document-Based Questions (DBQs). This feature is considered BETA and is only available in some Interactive Edition digital products. The teacher is in complete control of the Feedback generated by the Grading Assistant.

When Grade Assignment view is selected in the Grading Bar, the Grade and Feedback Panel will display in the Right Panel of the screen.
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There are three different panels in the Grade and Feedback Panel on the right side of the screen. These include: Grading Assistant (BETA), Grading Rubric for Essay, and Feedback for Student. Each of these sections will be explained in this article.
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By default, all student responses to Document-Based Questions (DBQs) and Long Essay Questions (LEQs) are submitted to OpenAI's ChatGPT for constructing feedback based on the detailed rubric from the College Board® in scoring these essays.
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When a teacher is in Grade Assignment view for DBQ or LEQ questions they will see the Grading Assistant (BETA) panel in the Grade and Feedback at the top of the Right Panel.

This panel will contain a Likely Score Range and a Summary of the student's essay. One can view more detailed feedback by selecting Show Feedback by Scoring Rubric link at the bottom of the panel.

This feedback will automatically be generated when students submit their assignment to the teacher. The Grading Assistant feedback is generally available in 2-3 minutes but could be slightly longer depending on the number of assignments being graded by the system.

The information contained or accessed from the Grading Assistant (BETA) panel is only available for the teacher. It is not shared with the student.

Selecting the Show Feedback by Scoring Rubric will provide a more detailed summary of the student's essay across the various areas of the College Board® Rubrics for grading Long Essay Questions (LEQs) and Document-Based Questions (DBQs).

The above image is showing the Grading Assistant Feedback for a Long Essay Question (LEQ).

The teacher can use this feedback as a guide as to what to look for when grading a student's essay. The feedback should help the teacher in identifying the amount of supports provided by the student so he or she do not have to track this detail when grading the assignment.

The Perfection Next® Grading Assistant should help save the teacher time when grading Document-Based Questions (DBQs) and Long Essay Questions (LEQs). By saving teachers time in grading these assignments, it enables the teacher to provide more opportunities for student essay writing practice with little to no work from the teacher.

With the essay questions being a critical component of the College Board® Exam, the increased opportunities for practicing Document-Based Questions (DBQs) and Long Essay Questions (LEQs) helps build the skills to answer these types of questions on the exam. Utilizing the Grading Assistant Feedback for Students enables teachers the ability to generate constructive detailed feedback to help students improve their writing for these essay prompts.

The feedback provided by Perfection Next® Grading Assistant is a very comprehensive evaluation of the student essays which will inform teachers at many levels about the success of the students' work. Each of the Reporting Categories from the College Board® Grading Rubric are evaluated with feedback provided for each area.

This feature is extremely easy to use as the information is made available to the teacher for all essays shortly after they are submitted to the teacher by the student.

When viewing the Feedback by Scoring Rubric a teacher will see Likely Score Range as well as an overall summary of feedback for the student essay and a summary for each reporting category of the rubric.

At the bottom of this window, the teacher can provide Perfection Learning a rating of the quality of the feedback provided by the Grading Assistant on the student's essay.

One simply selects the Disappointed, Neutral, or Smiley face icon to rate the feedback.

This rating will provide Perfection Learning with valuable information that we can incorporate into future enhancements to the Perfection Next® Grading Assistant.

This panel is where the teacher awards points to the student's essay based on the rubric and scoring criteria for the selected assignment.

This section of Grade and Feedback panel does NOT use Generative AI in anyway. The teacher is the one that must assign point values to each section of the grading rubric. As they award points, the Points Earned will calculate based as points are awarded.

The above rubric is for a Long Essay Question (LEQ) with 6 possible points being awarded for the student's essay.

Selecting the View Scoring Criteria links under a Reporting Category will take the user to the Scoring Criteria and Decision rules for the selected category. You may also review the entire set of guidelines in the support article below.

The Grading Rubric for a Document-Based Question functions just like the Long Essay Question (LEQ) description above. The difference is the Document Based Questions are graded on a 7 point rubric. The Evidence Reporting category has two subcategories to it: From the Documents and Beyond the Documents where up to 3 points can be awarded.

Selecting the View Scoring Criteria links under a Reporting Category will take the user to the Scoring Criteria and Decision rules for the selected category. You may also review the entire set of guidelines in the support article below.

Below the Grading Rubric for Essay Panel in the Grading and Feedback Panel teachers have the opportunity to provide feedback that goes to the student along with the completed grading rubric.

Teachers can select the Generate Feedback button which is the right most icon on the Editing Toolbar. This will utilize the Grading Assistant Feedback that is available to the teacher, but targeted to the student and organized as a bullet point list of Strength and Weaknesses.

Each time a teacher wants to utilize the Generate Feedback feature for Feedback to Student, they will be required to select the I Agree button on the Teacher Responsibility Confirmation popup.

Teachers are responsible for reviewing the generated feedback for accuracy and relevance before selecting Submit Grade which releases the information to the student. Teachers can delete the generated feedback if they disagree with it or edit it as necessary including adding additional feedback for the student.

You will be required to complete the Grading Rubric for the student's essay and provide feedback to the student before the Submit Grade button will be enabled.

The grade and feedback information is determined by the setting of the assignment's Allow students to review answers when the assignment is created and the status of the grading for the assignment. The options for this are; after assignment due date/time (default), after assignment graded for all students, or as student assignments are graded.

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While the Perfection Next® Grading Assistant provides feedback to teachers based on the student's work that is not shared with the student. The quantitative feedback and qualitative feedback are strictly meant to assist the teacher in grading of the student's work.
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The teacher must award the points earned by the student for their essay in the detailed scoring rubric. They are able to assign points as they see fit and can ignore the quantitative feedback provided by the Grading Assistant.

If the teacher desires to use the qualitative feedback provided by the Grading Assistant in the Feedback for Student, they MUST select I Agree button on the popup after selecting the AI feedback to generate the draft feedback for the student. They are agreeing to reading and verifying the information that will be provided to the student is accurate and represents their feedback to the student, making any necessary changes to the feedback.

Failure to select the I Agree button will prevent the teacher from using the Grading Assistant to draft feedback to the student.

The Feedback to Student is based on the Grading Assistant Feedback provided to the teacher in Grading Assistant (BETA) panel. However, it has been revised for the audience of the student and organized as Strengths and Weakness in bullet point format. The teacher can modify as they see if including discarding the feedback, removing parts of it, enhance it by adding additional feedback.
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We do store the feedback generated by the Grading Assistant for Student Feedback when generated as well as the version of the feedback the teacher releases to the student.

If you do not want to use the Grading Assistant, simply ignore the Grading Assistant (BETA) panel when grading assignments and do not select the Generate Feedback button on the Feedback to Student toolbar.

When disabled the Grading Assistant (BETA) panel will not be displayed to teachers nor will they have the Generate Feedback button in the Feedback for Student panel.

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The Grading Assistant functionality is currently only available in the following Interactive Edition products:

The functionality is only enabled for Long Essay Questions (LEQs) and Document-Based Questions (DBQs) within these products. In the future it will be extended to Short-Answer Questions (SAQs) as well as other Interactive Edition products.

The Grading Assistant is considered Beta functionality in Perfection Next. It is being used solely for providing teacher's assistance in helping to reduce time for them to grade student's work product, the essay.

Though Generative AI could make mistakes, our testing of this capability has provided consistent results that we believe will make it easier for teachers to grade essays created by students as well as help them in providing constructive feedback for students to improve their writing skills.

There is no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that is shared with OpenAI or other third parties to provide the Grading Assistant functionality. The student's work product, the essay, is shared with Open AI to use Generative AI to evaluate the student's response to the prompt.
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The Perfection Next® Grading Assistant uses GPT-4 from OpenAI for generating the feedback for Long Essay Questions (LEQs) and Document-Based Questions (DBQs). It is the GPT-4o variant that is currently being used.