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Artificial Intelligence will soon help teachers rate students’ academic and “soft” skills at schools using nontraditional report cards that skip A-F grading after an AI company purchased the non-profit Mastery Transcript Consortium last month.  

The New York-based company is developing AI tools to give teachers and students immediate feedback on papers, exams, recorded presentations and even artwork to the 400 public and private schools in the consortium.

Legend.org co-founder Matt Sornson said the company’s platform lets teachers upload student work 鈥� either digital files or even photos of handwritten work. AI will then use state, school, or teacher standards to evaluate the work.

The technology will go even further for mastery schools, which gauge how students improve toward mastering soft skills such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking. The AI tools will help teachers track progress on these more subjective skills using indicators educators and researchers are still developing.   

Sornson said that AI tools he is working on will evaluate communication skills, for example, from recorded verbal presentations.

“There’s some pretty pretty cool models around where you can do tone of voice, you can do body language and posture, you can do eye contact,” he said. “There’s a lot of really really cool things you can do with video.”

Sornson said AI would not judge whether a piece of art work is 鈥済ood,鈥� just technical aspects of it. 

For visual art, he said that could include composition, technical execution, use of materials, visual communication, and originality.

For music, Sornson said, AI could judge 鈥渞hythm, pitch and intonation鈥�.鈥� The technology could also 鈥渞eview recordings, video, written scores鈥�and student reflections,鈥� he said. 

He stressed that AI won鈥檛 be giving student work the final ratings, just acting as an aide to teachers.

“It does the first pass of assessing (their) rubric and what (they’re) trying to grade,” Sornson said. “(AI) would ingest those assignments, those artifacts, and then do the first pass of assessment. It’s always the teacher choosing the final grade.”

“We are just taking the first version, showing them where they should focus their efforts, and trying to save teachers time,” he added.

That middle ground could be an important one, as educators and researchers nationally sort out how AI can be best used to help teachers grade student work and offer meaningful followup instruction. Some researchers have found AI feedback too lenient to students or to

Several colleges and schools are trying to so it can help teachers and also protect student interests. 

Experts have stressed the importance of being transparent with students about how much teachers use AI and of making sure the technology isn鈥檛 showing any troublesome biases. Having humans make important decisions also matters, wrote Amanda Hirsch, an assistant director of the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Northern Illinois in a

鈥淎s we stand at this crossroads of education and emerging technology, the question isn鈥檛 whether to use AI in grading, but how to use it ethically and intelligently,鈥� Hirsch wrote.

The Mastery Transcript Consortium is a group of schools that has developed a new report card and transcript model that skips A-F grades in favor of tracking student progress on dozens of academic and soft skills, such as collaboration, communication and critical thinking.

In 2024, it merged with the Educational Testing Service, the company known for running the SAT and GRE college admissions tests, joining the Skills for the Future effort by ETS and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to better assess how well students are learning skills and to prove those skills to colleges and employers.

But ETS decided to focus on creating new assessments and less on report cards. It sold the consortium and its transcript model last month to the for-profit for an undisclosed amount.

Consortium founder Scott Looney, head of the private Hawken School in Cleveland, Ohio, said he is also excited about how AI can help teachers. AI, he said, can reduce the time teachers spend reading and grading student work and can offer immediate feedback to both students and teachers that they can discuss and shift quickly toward improving. 

Gauging how well students are doing on soft skills 鈥� such as self-direction, generating solutions or synthesizing information 鈥� isn鈥檛 simple, either, he said. Students build portfolios of work across multiple courses that show their progress on multiple skills. AI, he said, can evaluate progress across many pieces of work and summarize them much faster than teachers 鈥� and later college admissions staff 鈥� can.

“If we can make this easier for students to pull their portfolios together, easier for teachers to get feedback to the kids about the quality of the work in their portfolios, and then easier for the receivers of our transcripts that are full of portfolios to interpret them, I think this is going to go exponential,鈥� Looney said.

Over time, Looney said, he hopes students could even submit work to the platform on their own for suggestions before turning it in to a teacher.

A key feature of the upcoming tools, Sornson said, is that student work can be measured against any standards a school chooses. That could include public breakdowns of skills and subskills 鈥� such as those from ETS and Carnegie, , or 鈥� or any that schools develop themselves.

Looney said colleges or employers might eventually be able to submit their own standards for skills they want from applicants for AI to use to measure student work from all four years of high school.

Though Looney said one of his campuses that uses the mastery report cards will try the AI tools out as Legend offers them, other schools in the consortium are still learning about the sale and haven’t said yet what they plan to do. 

鈥淚 would be surprised if schools decide to forsake the AI tools as they will be highly accurate and save students and teachers time,鈥� Looney said.

Looney said he was concerned at first that the transcript model he created with other schools would turn into a for-profit product. But he said the partnership relied on grants to operate that are not sustainable. The computerized system that creates the transcripts also needed improvements Legend is already doing, making it easier for new schools to join.

The split from ETS and Carnegie is friendly. Both Looney and Laura Slover, who heads the Skills for the Future effort of ETS and Carnegie, will be on an advisory board to the new company.

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