Together with the University of Bielefeld and LMU Munich, the research project DeepWrite and the start-up KlausurenKIste are advancing the digitalization of legal exam grading. The digital code of law developed by the young company LexMea is also being used in this effort.
The pilot project, initiated by Prof. Marie Herberger, offered students at the University of Bielefeld the opportunity to take a fully digitalized law exam for the first time during a mock exam in enforcement law in the winter semester of 2024/25. The exam was written on a computer using a digital code of law and was assessed both by human graders and by AI.
In the summer semester of 2025, this offering will be extended to a mock exam in administrative law at LMU Munich.
The goal of the pilot project is to explore the digitalization of legal exams and the associated challenges in grading, feedback, and assessment within the legal context.
In the virtual university course “Administrative Procedural Law” (“Verwaltungsprozessrecht”), offered by Professor Pache at the University of Würzburg, students will have the opportunity to benefit from a unique new teaching format starting in the summer semester of 2025: a legal exam with AI-assisted feedback.
The project is being implemented in cooperation with the interdisciplinary research initiative DeepWrite and is part of the special funding program “AI meets vhb” by the Virtual University of Bavaria (vhb).
The goal of the project is to further develop legal education through the targeted use of artificial intelligence (AI) and to explore new forms of personalized support. On a voluntary basis, students can submit a written exam in administrative or administrative procedural law, which will then be evaluated by a current GPT language model. The students receive detailed feedback on both the formal structure and the substantive legal reasoning of their written opinion – complemented by an AI-generated assessment.
The focus is not only on individualized learning support but also on the systematic testing and academic evaluation of AI-assisted correction tools in legal education.
The Hochschule für öffentlichen Dienst (HföD) in Hof offers various AI-supported exams for the degree program in Public Administration (FH) in cooperation with the research project DeepWrite. In the summer semester of 2024, intensive collaboration began with the so-called "Compliant Teamwork Klausur," a practice assignment that students work on collaboratively via the HföD's learning management system, ILIAS. This was expanded in the winter semester to include another digital exam completed individually.
The focus is on AI-generated feedback for legal exams that students write during their first semester. Before submitting their exams, students have the option to have their papers voluntarily reviewed by current GPT models and then revise their solutions accordingly. They receive both formal and content-related feedback from the AI, along with an evaluation depending on the exam.
The pilot project also includes a widespread field–test and an evaluation of the AI-based correction assistance.
In cooperation with the DeepWrite research project, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg is offering an online course on examination techniques in regard to the "Gutachtenstil" via the Virtuelle Hochschule Bayern (vhb). From the start of lectures in the winter semester 2023/24, we will be testing the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to correct short legal cases on the "Gutachtenstil" for first-year students.
In the online course, students can have their texts checked by Chat-GPT-4 and corrected with the support of AI on a voluntary basis before they apply the "Gutachtenstil" in real-life exams. In particular, the AI will point out missing elements and suggest linguistic and stylistic improvements.
The pilot project also includes an evaluation of the AI-proofreading assistant and a comparison of the feedback from human tutors with that of the AI.
In a keynote speech at the AI & Law conference of recode.law, Dr. Martin Zwickel from the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg spoke about ChatGPT in legal education and about the cooperation project.
