What is Socra?

The idea for Socra came from thinking about a problem which has existed in the classroom for a long time: How do you assess students in a way that helps rather than hinders learning? Not only do exams not help students learn, but they are often poor metrics of genuine understanding of a topic. We all remember times from our days in school when we received a low grade; but if you were anything like me, instead of going over the test, genuinely trying to understand where you went wrong, you'd lock the test in a drawer (along with all the shame and discomfort it represented) and never look at it again.

Conversely, when we receive high grades, most of us assume that we have mastered the topic and consequently that there is no need to go through the test. What this means, on a practical level, is that our current system of evaluation does an overall disservice to students. Grades are supposed to measure what you know. But in practice, what students actually learn is how to memorize what's likely to show up, spot patterns in past exams, and echo the professor's own opinions. Doing "well" in school has unfortunately become less about understanding the subject than reverse-engineering the grading system.

In addition to this problem, the advent of AI has made everything worse; assessing students has become more complicated than ever in an era where they can ask a chatbot to produce a coherent, passable essay on almost any topic. If you think you wouldn't have availed yourself of this technology (at least when you were in a pinch in college), you are lying to yourself. The technology is there, and it is not going away. So how do we work with it, rather than against it?

Socra is designed to address these problems. The idea is simple: Socra is an AI-powered assessment platform that provides teachers with a framework for evaluating how students think, rather than merely evaluating their ability to come up with a "correct" answer. Instead of handing over solutions, Socra guides students through an LLM-driven dialogue where they must ask questions, test ideas, and reason their way forward. Teachers see the full transcript of this process, so they can grade quality of reasoning and curiosity, in addition to final answers.