Towards Transparent AI Grading: Semantic Entropy as a Signal for Human-AI Disagreement

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Hauptverfasser: Iyer, Karrtik, Ravikiran, Manikandan, Pendse, Prasanna, Mohanty, Shayan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Iyer, Karrtik
Ravikiran, Manikandan
Pendse, Prasanna
Mohanty, Shayan
author_facet Iyer, Karrtik
Ravikiran, Manikandan
Pendse, Prasanna
Mohanty, Shayan
contents Automated grading systems can efficiently score short-answer responses, yet they often fail to indicate when a grading decision is uncertain or potentially contentious. We introduce semantic entropy, a measure of variability across multiple GPT-4-generated explanations for the same student response, as a proxy for human grader disagreement. By clustering rationales via entailment-based similarity and computing entropy over these clusters, we quantify the diversity of justifications without relying on final output scores. We address three research questions: (1) Does semantic entropy align with human grader disagreement? (2) Does it generalize across academic subjects? (3) Is it sensitive to structural task features such as source dependency? Experiments on the ASAP-SAS dataset show that semantic entropy correlates with rater disagreement, varies meaningfully across subjects, and increases in tasks requiring interpretive reasoning. Our findings position semantic entropy as an interpretable uncertainty signal that supports more transparent and trustworthy AI-assisted grading workflows.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_04105
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Transparent AI Grading: Semantic Entropy as a Signal for Human-AI Disagreement
Iyer, Karrtik
Ravikiran, Manikandan
Pendse, Prasanna
Mohanty, Shayan
Artificial Intelligence
Automated grading systems can efficiently score short-answer responses, yet they often fail to indicate when a grading decision is uncertain or potentially contentious. We introduce semantic entropy, a measure of variability across multiple GPT-4-generated explanations for the same student response, as a proxy for human grader disagreement. By clustering rationales via entailment-based similarity and computing entropy over these clusters, we quantify the diversity of justifications without relying on final output scores. We address three research questions: (1) Does semantic entropy align with human grader disagreement? (2) Does it generalize across academic subjects? (3) Is it sensitive to structural task features such as source dependency? Experiments on the ASAP-SAS dataset show that semantic entropy correlates with rater disagreement, varies meaningfully across subjects, and increases in tasks requiring interpretive reasoning. Our findings position semantic entropy as an interpretable uncertainty signal that supports more transparent and trustworthy AI-assisted grading workflows.
title Towards Transparent AI Grading: Semantic Entropy as a Signal for Human-AI Disagreement
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04105