College Board’s AI Prototype
College Board is in the very early phases of exploring different ways we can incorporate AI tools to support AP students and teachers. With a small number of students and teachers, we are testing a generative AI tool we’ve built. This will help inform our exploration and research in the years to come.
About SAM
We know teachers want to give their students the feedback they need to do their best work.
Our AI-powered tool SAM is designed to support teachers as they guide students with project-based coursework. It is intended to save time for teachers. With SAM, teachers receive useful and more personalized feedback about each student’s progress at critical project touchpoints. Teachers can then tailor their discussions with students so they can stay on track with their projects.
Our Approach
Educators have been at the center of our product development. We are committed to three guiding principles: user-centered design, research-based insight, and ethical AI practices.
- Collaboratively Designed: We co-designed this chatbot with AP educators; conducted teacher interviews; and partnered with subject matter experts in psychometrics, learning engineering, learning sciences, and generative AI in education.
- Responsibly Tested: We rigorously tested our product to safeguard against prompt injections and attacks, conducted experiments with a dataset designed to highlight social biases known as the Bias Benchmark for Quality Assurance, and dedicated effort to analyze and understand question difficulty to ensure student equity.
- Security and Privacy Compliant: College Board has stringent security policies. We safeguard the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all data processed by SAM, with close collaboration from our Data and Security teams.
How SAM Works
Student interactions with SAM are designed to assist teachers in providing targeted support. With these four steps, SAM can be a tool to guide discussions with students and help teachers identify where further individual support is needed.
| Step 1 | Students Begin Students will share a completed outline or annotated bibliography with SAM the chatbot. |
| Step 2 | SAM Gets to Work SAM will ask the student questions inspired by the Socratic method to understand the student's approach to the assignment and how they arrived at their finished product. |
| Step 3 | Reporting to the Teacher Teachers will get a Classroom Summary breaking out the Overall Performance of each student. The summary provides access to their student's conversation history with SAM. |
| Step 4 | Getting Informed Insight Teachers can use data and insights from these interactions to have constructive, personalized discussions about each student’s engagement and learning at various stages of performance tasks. |