MCAS AI Grading Glitch Mis-scores 1,400 Student Essays Across Massachusetts — A Cautionary Case in Automated Assessment

During the 2025 Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) administration, an automated AI scoring tool — used to grade open-response essay questions, with roughly 10% of AI-scored essays normally re-checked by human readers — produced a temporary scoring glitch.
A teacher at the Reilly Elementary School in Lowell noticed a discrepancy between a student's essay and its assigned score and alerted school and district leaders in mid-July 2025. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) subsequently found that roughly 1,400 of the state's 750,000 MCAS essays had been mis-scored, with some student responses wrongly marked '0' when they should have scored as high as 6 on a 1-to-7 scale.
Districts across the state were affected, including Attleboro, Fall River, New Bedford and Taunton in Bristol County; DESE reported that close to 200 schools in roughly 145 districts were touched by the error, though the average impact was only one or two mis-scored students per affected district. All flagged essays were rescored and every affected district was notified, with corrected results issued by August 2025.
The case is included here as a cautionary example: it shows both the risk of automated assessment at state scale and the value of human oversight — the error was caught by a classroom teacher, not the AI system itself — and it illustrates a comparatively transparent post-incident response by the state education agency.

Read the full analysis: https://www.boston.com/news/education/2025/09/17/mcas-essays-scored-incorrectly-ai-mishap/