AI is part of the progress that we humans have constantly been striving for.

Though AI might not be our

last invention, it significantly impacts our lives in numerous ways. Because of AI, we can now offload a
lot of our manual tasks to machines. It would be incorrect to say that AI has made our lives easier. Some
of the areas where it has positively affected us include healthcare, agriculture, business processes, and
education.

As student testing plays an important role in many educational systems, many projects are trying to
explore the use of AI for automatic test generation and assessment. Much of this work is aimed at
automating summative assessment, with a promise of reducing teacher workloads. A possible
unintended consequence of this work is that high-stakes testing will be increasingly displaced by
frequent low-stakes formative assessment, as the effort and cost required for assessment decreases.
Current AI systems are very good in combining evidence from complex and varied sources of data and
using them for realtime pattern recognition. For example, student homework can relatively easily be
checked and diagnosed by an AI system that has data on both individual student history and peer
responses. Accumulated formative assessments could, therefore, to a large extent make high-stakes
testing redundant. AI is also beginning to be used to diagnose student attention, emotion, and
conversation dynamics in computer-supported learning environments, for example for course
development and management, in an attempt to generate optimal groups for collaborative learning
tasks, and to recognize patterns that predict student drop-out. Student behavior also has to be actively
monitored to provide feedback for learning. This creates technical needs to unobtrusively monitor
students, for example, using video processing and remote eye tracking, with associated ethical and
regulatory challenges.

Figure 1: Skills of the language’s key competence and some associated AI capabilities