Artificial intelligence has proven that it can trawl the internet to retrieve information quickly for answering questions. But teaching students using AI is a harder task. The stakes are even higher when the goal is not just learning in school, but performing well on high-stakes exams like the SAT and ACT.
On the face of it, education might seem like a natural extension of large language models. If AI can replace customer support, certainly it can provide back answers just as a teacher would.
But being educated in a school is not a consumer experience. Teachers and school administrators aren’t looking for chatbots. Chatbots can hallucinate, chatbots can make mistakes. But if you hand over the instruction of a pupil to a chatbot, you can impede a student’s progress for months. Educators need the tools they use to be bullet-proof, safe, accountable, and consistent.
That’s why the creators of Smartschool, a Palo Alto-based educational technology company, decided to build their platform by starting with the problems faced by students and educators. Rather than adapting existing AI tools, they invested in building an AI tutor designed to help students truly learn and perform under pressure. That gap between a clever chatbot and a tool educators can actually trust is what Smartschool set out to close, with the SAT and ACT among the key exams it supports.
