Ethics, Privacy, and Transparency in AI‐Assisted Teaching: Evaluating Notegrade.ai Against Global Standards

This article provides a deep, standards-based analysis of Notegrade.ai –an AI teaching tool that provides lesson plan generation, rubric based grading, plagiarism check, and student assessment tools- within several of the world’s most pertinent legal and ethical frameworks in education including the GDPR, the EU AI Act, the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, COPPA/FERPA recommendations and guidelines, and international explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) literature. Through a compliance and transparency checklist of risks and explainability in the literature regarding automated scoring, as well as a qualitative audit of Notegrade.ai’s public product pages and privacy and cookie policies, we highlight strengths and gaps in the information provided by the site, with recommendations for developers, schools, and policymakers to minimize harms and increase trust. Highlights: Notegrade.ai offers some helpful productivity tools for teachers, but documentation available to the public does not go into detail on some of the high-stakes issues such as the origin of data used to train the company’s AI, evidence of the model’s performance across demographic groups, and safeguards against and appeals for automated decisions that are increasingly required by global standards . We offer a pragmatic path to remediation and a testing protocol for use in future audits.