Doing Responsibilities with Automated Grading Systems: An Empirical Multi-Stakeholder Exploration

Automated Grading Systems (AGSs) are increasingly used in higher education assessment practices, raising issues about the responsibilities of the various stakeholders involved both in their design and use. This study explores how teachers, students, exam administrators, and developers of AGSs perceive and enact responsibilities around such systems. Drawing on a focus group and interview data, we applied Fuchsberger and Frauenberger’s [27] notion of Doing Responsibilities as an analytical lens. This notion, framing responsibility as shared among human and nonhuman actors (e.g., technologies and data), has guided our analysis of how responsibilities are continuously configured and enacted in university assessment practices. The findings illustrate the stakeholders’ perceived and enacted responsibilities at different phases, contributing to the HCI literature on Responsible AI and AGSs by presenting a practical application of the ‘Doing Responsibilities’ framework before, during and after design. We discuss how the findings enrich this notion, emphasising the importance of engaging with nonhumans, considering regulatory aspects of responsibility, and addressing relational tensions within automation.