Evaluating AI Grading on Real-World Handwritten College Mathematics: A Large-Scale Study Toward a Benchmark
Zhiqi Yu, Xingping Liu, Haobin Mao, Mingshuo Liu, Long Chen, Jack Xin, Yifeng Yu
Abstract
Grading in large undergraduate STEM courses often yields minimal feedback due to heavy instructional workloads. We present a large-scale empirical study of AI grading on real, handwritten single-variable calculus work from a major U.S. public research university. Using OCR-conditioned large language models with structured, rubric-guided prompting, our system produces scores and formative feedback for thousands of free-response quiz submissions from nearly 800 students. In a setting with no single ground-truth label, we evaluate performance against official teaching-assistant grades, student surveys, and independent human review, finding strong alignment with TA scoring and a large majority of AI-generated feedback rated as correct or acceptable across quizzes. Beyond calculus, this setting highlights core challenges in OCR-conditioned mathematical reasoning and partial-credit assessment. We analyze key failure modes, propose practical rubric- and prompt-design principles, and introduce a multi-perspective evaluation protocol for reliable, real-course deployment. Building on the dataset and evaluation framework developed here, we outline a standardized benchmark for AI grading of handwritten mathematics to support reproducible comparison and future research.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
yu2026evaluating,
title={Evaluating {AI} Grading on Real-World Handwritten College Mathematics: A Large-Scale Study Toward a Benchmark},
author={Zhiqi Yu and Xingping Liu and Haobin Mao and Mingshuo Liu and Long Chen and Jack Xin and Yifeng Yu},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=vcdsMrNGqP}
}