Is AI-Graded Education Really the Education of the Future?

Is AI-Graded Education Really the Education of the Future?

– Reflecting on the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education's pilot project for AI essay assessment

Introduction

In July 2025, the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education announced that it would introduce an AI-based system for short-answer and essay-style assessment.

It's an attempt to move beyond the limits of multiple-choice-centered evaluation, and it is set to be applied in earnest starting with social studies and science for first-year middle schoolers and first-year high schoolers.

But watching this announcement, I asked myself this:

“Is this really the right direction?”

Can AI grading truly be a system that ‘cultivates’ students' thinking and creativity?

Or is it nothing more than an automation of the existing evaluation framework?

1. The Illusion of the ‘95% Match’ Figure

Superintendent Lim Tae-hee explained that “teacher grading and AI grading matched more than 95% of the time.”

But this statement provokes a different question.

Did the AI evaluate like a human, or did the human's evaluation criteria become standardized like an AI's?

The essence of an essay-style question lies not in whether the answer is correct, but in ‘the process by which thought unfolds.’

So the fact that the match rate is high may actually be a signal that the diversity of thinking has disappeared.

2. Education for Thinking, or Training to Optimize for AI Grading?

This system was introduced under the banner of cultivating thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills.

But paradoxically, students may end up learning only ‘the kind of answers that score well with AI grading.’

Rather than originality, students come to worry first about “sentence structures that are easy for AI to understand.”

This trend blurs the essence of education.

In the end, what remains is not “creative expression” but only “gradable expression.”

3. A Teacher's Aide, or a Shift in Who Holds Authority over Education?

AI is described as a tool that lightens teachers' workload.

But the moment the authority to judge — the act of grading — passes to AI, the teacher is pushed into the role of assistant.

AI makes its judgments based on data.

But a student's context, emotions, and trajectory of growth are not captured by data.

The agent of education must still be a human being.

AI should remain a helping aide, not a judge.

4. The Possibility of ‘Profiling’ Thought

A structure in which AI analyzes every answer and gives feedback

could develop into a system that records even a student's language habits, emotional flow, and thinking patterns.

This could degenerate from ‘educational feedback’ into a management system that operates by turning thought into patterns.

In particular, AI grading carried out without any recognition of emotion or context easily drifts toward fitting humans to the system.

5. What Is True Future-Oriented Education?

True future-oriented education should point in the following directions.

• A structure that helps students think in their own language, make mistakes, and grow

• A culture in which teachers communicate around questions rather than correct answers

• A position where AI becomes a partner for dialogue and expansion, not for grading

AI should not be the standard that judges thinking;

it should be a companion that walks alongside a student's thought.

In Closing

The Gyeonggi Office of Education's attempt is part of the current of change.

But whether the present direction is truly drawing closer to the essence of education —

that is a question more people need to ask.

More than the speed of technology,

what matters more is the depth of our pursuit toward the essence of education.

P.S. Education Must Be Action

I do not define education as ‘evaluation.’

I believe education must be taught through action.

The act of gripping a pencil,

the act of speaking up,

the act of reading a book aloud,

the act of listening closely.

The direction in which the body walks forward,

the speed at which the heart runs,

the sensation of making something with your fingertips,

and the act of reflecting, on your own, on all of those processes.

Education, in the end,

must take place in the way the body remembers,

in the way life seeps in.

You cannot raise a person through evaluation.

People learn by moving,

and they grow within action.

Author

Lee DongHun

Ma-eum Company – Designer of Resonance-Based AI Systems