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yorwbayesterday at 9:33 PM0 repliesview on HN

Worse, because students complained about the difficulty of the AI-graded quizzes, they switch to multiple-choice questions only, which increases engagement, but after analyzing the exam results they determine that multiple-choice questions don't seem to help and add AI-graded questions back, after which engagement drops again.

That means their experiment design is partially caused by their results instead of the other way around, which is a bad situation to be in. Their statistical analysis is completely inadequate for dealing with this.

And the change in engagement suggests that there's strong selection involved. Their attempt to use midterm scores to control for selection effects is unconvincing. Why not control for whether students used the platform more when there were only multiple-choice questions? Those are the ones who self-selected out of using the AI grader.