When Your Paper Gets Graded by a Robot That Knows Your Teacher

From spellcheck to surveillance?

Remember when Grammarly was just a glorified spellchecker that kept you from embarrassing yourself with a misplaced comma? Those days are long gone. Now the company seems determined to ride the AI wave harder than anyone else, and its latest invention is… well, let’s just say “a little creepy” might be putting it gently.

Earlier this week, Grammarly announced a new lineup of AI “agents” designed for students. One of them is an AI Grader that doesn’t just give you feedback on your essay. No, this one claims it can actually predict the grade your professor will give you. And here’s where things get odd: part of how it makes this prediction is by “looking up publicly available instructor information.”

Which means, in plain English, the system is poking around online to figure out what kind of teacher you have before it decides whether your paper deserves a Bminus or something higher.

How the AI Grader supposedly works

According to Grammarly’s own demo, you start by filling out a form with your instructor’s name, the university they teach at, and the course you’re taking. You also upload the class rubricthe scoring sheet professors often hand out at the start of a semester. Then the AI rolls up its sleeves.

“Looking up your instructor,” it says. “Reviewing public teaching info. Identifying key grading priorities.”

And thenbamthe verdict. In one example, the AI graded a paper and spat out: “Predicted grade: 78/100.” Brutal.

Now, to be clear, Grammarly doesn’t say exactly what information it digs up. Maybe it’s pulling from ratemyprofessors.com, faculty bios, or random syllabi floating online. But the vagueness is almost worse than transparency. If it’s not actually scraping much, the whole exercise is pointless. If it is digging deeply, well… that’s a different level of invasive.

Why this feels unsettling

Let’s pause for a second. Imagine you’re a student writing a history essay. Instead of emailing a draft to your friend or meeting with the writing center, you feed it into this AI. Behind the scenes, the program is rifling through the digital traces your professor has left online. It then generates feedback like, “Contexts could be more deeply theorized,” or “Clarify the flow.”

Generic advice, sure, but suddenly it’s dressed up with a pseudopersonal touch: “The professor may say…” Honestly, it feels like a cheap magic trick. Like one of those carnival psychics who reads your body language and then says something obvious about your life.

Even if the system can’t actually stalk your teacher, the principle of it is ugly. Do students really need to mimic their professor’s grading quirks in order to learn? Or is this just training them to think like algorithms, not people?

Tools for both sides of the war

What makes this even stranger is that Grammarly isn’t only selling to students. In the same breath, it’s offering educators their own set of AI agentstools to detect plagiarism or sniff out AIgenerated writing. There’s even an “AI Detector” and a “Plagiarism Checker.”

So you have a company that equips students with tools to disguise their AIassisted work while simultaneously handing teachers tools to catch that very thing. It’s like an arms dealer selling weapons to both sides of the battlefield, then pretending it’s helping “maintain balance.”

There’s also the bizarrely named AI Humanizer, which promises to take text that “sounds AIish” and repackage it so it feels more naturalironic, considering that most of us are currently wondering how much of our daily reading is already AIproduced.

A step too far, or inevitable evolution?

Now, some people would argue this is just the natural progression of education tech. After all, students are already using ChatGPT to brainstorm, outline, and sometimes outright draft their essays. Professors know it. Universities know it. Pretending otherwise is naïve. In that light, Grammarly might claim it’s merely giving students better AI tools, ones that (supposedly) don’t replace learning but “enhance” it.

Jenny Maxwell, Grammarly’s head of education, even said as much: “Students today need AI that enhances their capabilities without undermining their learning.” She framed these tools as preparation for the workplace, where AI literacy will be essential. And she’s not wrongmany jobs already assume you’ll use AI. Marketing teams rely on it, customer service bots are everywhere, and even coders are leaning on GitHub Copilot.

But here’s the catch: knowing how to work with AI is not the same as outsourcing critical thinking to it. If students start tailoring their essays based on an algorithm’s guess at what Professor Smith at Boston University wants, they’re learning the art of gaming a system, not the art of writing.

The bigger question

This raises a broader, uncomfortable question: are we okay with turning education into a performance for machines rather than a process of human growth? Because that’s what’s at stake. The act of writing an essay isn’t just about getting a grade. It’s about stumbling through ideas, learning how to argue, discovering your own voice. If an AI is quietly whispering, “Here’s what your teacher likes, just do that,” then the student’s actual voice gets muffled.

And there’s another layer: privacy. If companies normalize the idea of scraping instructor data, what’s next? Predicting grades based on your social media activity? Adjusting essay feedback depending on whether the AI thinks you’re a “serious” student or a slacker? Slippery slope arguments can be tiresome, but in this case, they’re not hard to imagine.

Final thoughts

To be fair, Grammarly isn’t the only company pushing into this weird new space where education, surveillance, and AI intersect. And some students will absolutely love it. If you’re scrambling to pass a required econ class and need to know whether your halfbaked essay will scrape by with a C+, this tool probably feels like a lifesaver.

But for everyone elsethe teachers trying to maintain integrity in their classrooms, the students who still want to write something that reflects their own thinkingit feels like a step in the wrong direction. Maybe a dangerous one.

Because at the end of the day, learning isn’t about predicting what someone else will say. It’s about having something worth saying yourself.

Open Your Mind !!!

Source: Futurism