arXiv:2611.13217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines the reliability of Claude Code, an agentic deployment of the Claude Opus 4.6 large language model, as a grading system for handwritten university exams. Four research questions addressed agreement with expert human grading on total scores (RQ1), agreement across five question types from multiple choice to evaluative judgement (RQ2), consistency across two independent grading sessions one week apart (RQ3), and the accuracy of AI-generated feedback (RQ4). Claude Code graded the 20-mark mid-term papers of 60 consenting students in a Saudi computer graphics course in a single agentic session, guided by three rubric files. Reliability was estimated on disjoint samples: 20 papers for RQ1, RQ2 and RQ4, and 15 papers for RQ3. Analyses used Pearson correlation, mean absolute error, Bland-Altman analysis, weighted Cohen kappa, intraclass correlation, and a four-category coding scheme separating diagnostic from confirmation feedback. The author, as the sole subject-matter expert for the course, provided the human benchmark, so the design assesses agreement with a domain-expert reference rather than inter-rater reliability. AI grading agreed strongly with human grading on totals (r = 0.97; MAE = 0.85 marks) with a small but significant AI-positive bias of 0.68 marks, showed excellent test-retest consistency (ICC = 0.96), and produced accurate feedback (92.8% diagnostic; 97.8% confirmation). Drawing items were the outlier on three of four measures. Three failure modes recurred: keyword matching without conceptual depth, selection-state ambiguity on corrected multiple-choice answers, and region-of-attention drift on hand-drawn diagrams. The findings suggest that AI grading at this capability level can assist instructors on objective and short-form items under structural safeguards but is not yet ready to replace instructor judgement at boundary cases or on drawing items.
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