Our commitment to revolutionizing education with FairGrade
The most I learned in high school happened while I was preparing for the Physics Olympiads.
It was difficult. Many times I went into the physics lab knowing that I was going to face problems I simply did not know how to solve.
What helped me was having professors around me who made that feel normal. Sometimes we would sit together and think through a problem out loud. They would ask what I understood, what was I thinking, what I've been trying, and what basic ideas I might be ignoring.
Eventually, I became more comfortable exploring the ideas and stopped focusing so much on the problems themselves.
If I noticed that I did not really understand something about magnetism, I could explore magnetism with the professor. The lab asisstant would often bring equipment out and show me what I was learning. I remember experimenting with sand and magnets and seeing that something that looked very complicated on paper was really built from much simpler ideas.
Other times, I would just draw.
I remember an optics problem where a beam of light entered a semicircular block and came out somewhere else. I kept drawing different trajectories and angles. I kept exploring until I figured it out. Then I showed one of the professors that was mentoring me on optics, and we both thought it was a really elegant solution and explanation.
That made difficult work fun.
I also had an insane amount of books. Some were in English, some were college books, and many explained the same ideas differently. If one explanation did not click, I could move to another one and see the concept from another perspective.
I had professors to talk to, a lab where I could experiment, books everywhere, and the freedom to focus deeply on learning.
I wish every student could experience that level of support and rate of learning. Of course, we cannot give every student an entire physics department. But I think it is important that students can eventually have that level of resources and help from experts.
Friction
Learning is supposed to be difficult.
There were many problems I could not solve and concepts that puzzled me. Sometimes I had to read something several times, draw, experiment, talk about it with my professors, come back again and still struggle with it.
That difficulty was not the problem. The problem is when students feel completely helpless and lost.
For many students, there are too many barriers between them and what they are trying to understand. They do not get the ideas and everything feels alien or too fast. I call those barriers friction in education.
Learning will always remain difficult, because thinking is difficult. But students should feel capable of going through that difficulty.
Professors have limits too
I remember finding around ten pages of vector exercises that were helping me build a much better intuition for vectors.
I showed them to my physics professor and asked whether we could use something like that with the entire class.
She told me that if she did, she would never finish grading and reviewing everybody's work.
And she was right.
This is one of the places where I think technology can help.
Professors should have tools that help them understand how students are doing, give more personalized feedback, and turn their knowledge and experience into better materials without requiring more work from them.
Technology should allow professors and students to do more and do it more efficiently.
Technology is not always the answer
There are also many problems in education that we cannot solve by adding more technology.
Phones are a problem. Poor reading habits are a problem. There are many factors that affect how students learn.
Sometimes the right thing to do is not to build another AI tool, but to study what is happening and use what we learn to improve education with or without technology.
That is important to us. Our goal is not more technology but better education in general.
FairGrade
FairGrade is where we research these ideas and build tools around what we learn.
Most of the work is thinking about what the future should look like, talking to professors and students, getting their feedback, and then building and researching it.
Right now, we have a limited preview environment where we can test ideas, and our first experiment is running with a small group of professors.
We call it FairGrade Pulse.
With Pulse, we are exploring how AI can help us understand course performance and give professors useful information without requiring more effort from them.
We are still figuring out what is fair, what is right, what works, and what does not by implementing these ideas in real classrooms.
We do research and we build tools. More often than not, those tools will be free and open source.
Fair to professors, students and learning
Fairness has always been one of the most important principles behind FairGrade.
Everything we do has to be fair to professors, to students, to learning, and to humans.
We want to measure understanding, the student process, interaction with AI, and interaction with the literature or existing work without requiring more effort from the professor. We want to reduce cheating.
We want to understand what technology improves and what it makes worse.
You can think of FairGrade as a safety research layer.
Many people will implement these technologies into academic tools. We want to go deeper and understand what actually works and what does not.
If something does not work, we want to know that before it becomes part of classrooms.
Building it together
Professors help us by giving feedback and testing our experiments early.
We onboard them, and periodically we meet to test ideas and understand what is useful.
Students are just as important, and FairGrade Companion will explore that side of the project.
Nightingale supports FairGrade with researchers and developers who help study these problems and build the tools we want to test.
What we want education to feel like
We imagine professors spending more of their time doing what they love. Students having fun doing hard mental work.
Learning will still be difficult. Students will still have to think and struggle with hard ideas.
But they should not feel completely lost or incapable of learning them.
I want more students to have the support, resources, feedback, and freedom to explore that made learning so enjoyable for me.
And I want professors to be able to provide that without exhausting themselves.
It sounds simple, but if that becomes true, the world changes. The world becomes more capable, more curious, and more intelligent.
We want educators, students, researchers, and people who care about education to help us figure out what that future should look like.
Help us ensure that the next generation of academic tools is built on data, ethics, and human-centric values by subscribing to our newsletter.
If you are interested in working directly with us, contact me at allan@fairgradeproject.org.