AI-Assisted Feedback

Artemis can ask Athena to write feedback on a submission. It does this in two quite different situations, and they are worth keeping apart because they serve different people.

	Grading feedback suggestions	Formative feedback requests
Who asks	Nobody — they are waiting when a reviewer opens a submission	The student, on a draft
Who reads	The reviewer, before they mark	The student
When	After the due date, while marking	Before the due date
Effect on the mark	None until a reviewer submits the assessment	None at all
Exercise types	Text, programming, modeling	Text, modeling, and programming where the exercise is assessed semi-automatically

Neither ever marks anything. A suggestion is a draft a person accepts, edits or discards, and a formative response is guidance the student reads. The mark is always written by a reviewer.

Switching It On

It is configured once, for the course, in the Athena AI Feedback panel on the course overview: a single Enabled/Disabled toggle turns both kinds on or off together, taking effect as soon as you set it. Configure opens the dedicated Athena settings page, where Grading feedback suggestions and Formative feedback requests turn on independently instead. See Course Configuration.

There is no per-exercise switch: an exercise gets AI feedback because its course has it on and because its type supports it. Two restrictions follow from the type rather than from a setting.

• A programming exercise takes formative feedback requests only where it is assessed semi-automatically — that is, where manual assessment is enabled alongside the tests. With purely automatic assessment there is nothing for Athena to be formative about.
• An exam exercise is outside this entirely. Exam feedback follows the exam's own review and publication dates.

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Information:

Because it is a course-level setting, turning it on reaches every eligible exercise at once, including exercises that already exist. Turning it off does the same.

What a Reviewer Sees

Where grading suggestions are on, opening a submission loads Athena's proposals into the assessment editor, which takes a moment. Each is a feedback block with points attached, sitting where a reviewer would have written one.

The exercise pages show this per type, because the editors differ: see text exercises and modeling exercises.

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Warning:

Suggestions are drawn from assessments already given in the same exercise, so they inherit whatever the first reviewers did — including their mistakes. Mark a first batch deliberately before leaning on them.

What a Student Sees

Where formative requests are on, a student can ask for preliminary feedback on a draft before the due date and get a response with a provisional score. It is explicitly not their mark, and Artemis says so where it appears.

Students can also shape how that feedback reads — how detailed and how formal — through their feedback preferences. See Adaptive Learning for those, and AI Feedback on a Draft for the student's side of the whole thing — how they ask, what comes back, and the limits on how often.

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Information:

A student cannot complain about preliminary AI feedback: there is no assessment to dispute yet. See Assessment and Grading.

Related

• Iris — the other AI a student meets, which tutors rather than assesses.
• Artemis Intelligence — every AI service Artemis integrates with, and who owns what.