It was Wednesday, the 21st of May 2019, when Mohammed, Awardee founder, got into his office, leaving behind one of these rare and beautiful sunny days in Glasgow. He was astounded by a pile, almost as tall as him, of student answer sheets packed in large plastic containers and stacked on one another.
Yes, you are right! he needed to mark them all. It wasn’t a new job for Mohammed to mark students’ coursework. However, this time the challenge rose to the point that he had never seen before.
The perspective of this repetitive task of marking the same essays dampened his spirit. Further, as soon as he has finished marking, he needs to address student complaints, inquiries, and objections and keep on remarking. It must be a better way to ensure honest and substantial feedback for students while eliminating all the repetitive tasks of grading.
Given Mohammed’s background in AI (has a PhD in AI and human computation), he started building a data model for subjective assignments ( the opposite are factual assignments), e.g. essays.
The aim was not to automate the marking task. Instead, it was to augment the lecturer’s experience and to make assignments an educational opportunity as much as a measurement tool by enabling a two ways communication between lecturers and students with a seamless effort from the lecturer side.
He successfully built a deep machine-learning model that can understand students’ answers and judge them on subjective criteria like critical thinking. Awardee was born at that moment. Since then, Awardee has been joined by fabulous team members. We are a four-person team dedicated to making the marking experience a beloved one again. We always say let teachers teach.
Awardee’s mission is to provide academic staff all over the UK with the right tool to save time while increasing the quality of their marking and, thus, the quality of the feedback given to their students.
