Automation and Assessment: Exploring Ethical Issues of Automated Grading Systems from a Relational Ethics Approach

Automation in assessment is a fast-emerging AI research field that raises ethical issues for education. So far, dominant approaches to ethics have led to the development of numerous ethical guidelines to fix issues that the deployment of AI systems might introduce. This chapter critically examines the ethical considerations of AI automation in education by focusing on assessment and Automated Grading Systems (AGS). To this end, a relational approach to ethics is discussed that focuses on AGS’ specificities regarding data, algorithms, and assessment and the context where these systems are used, including situations and purposes, actors and relations, and time and place.