The Kenya National Examinations Council has announced plans to drop the use of teachers in marking KCSE exams and replace them with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Announcing the new measure, Education CS said that the marking of KCSE has always been marred with problems with teachers going on strike, power failure stopping the exercise, teachers conspiring to favour their students, and social activities taking precedence over marking. The use of ChatGPT will solve most of these challenges.
“We want to eliminate the human factor while making the process faster, more objective, and cheaper. ChatGPT has proved that it can do anything an average person can do and we look forward to having the scripts marked in less than 24 hours.”
He further said that ChatGPT has a superior capacity to detect cheating students, as well as identify students who had seen the question papers in advance. “As part of their tradition, we know some schools have access to the original KCSE question papers two months before the exam. This is something we can tame using ChatGPT. The algorithm can expose this. Expect to see different results the next time we announce the results.”
Screenshot Answers
Students will be expected to take a screenshot of their answer sheets and submit it via a secure portal, before submitting the physical paper to the invigilator. The physical paper will not be marked but stored as a backup in case of any disputed results. Once the students submit the answers sheets, ChatGPT will instantly mark the work and the KCSE results can be announced just a few hours after the last paper is done.
The initiative will also save the ministry the money that is spent during the marking process. In the future, it is expected that students will not need to write their answers on the examination booklet, and will instead be examined by ChatGPT itself.
