Rule #16. Manual Grading is Biased.

Assessments feedback is often delayed!

Let me tell you about one of the toughest experiences I’ve had in my career. At one point, I decided to review the video assessments of everyone in the company—about 150 people. My goal was to benchmark product knowledge and identify gaps, but it ended up taking me nearly two months to get through all of them. And honestly? It wasn’t the best use of my time.

Now, let’s do the math. Each of the 150 employees submitted 45 video assessments, each around 15 minutes long. That’s 6,750 videos in total, adding up to over 1,687 hours of video content. Ridiculous, right? It was overwhelming, and I quickly realized that this wasn’t just a massive time sink—bias was creeping in, whether I liked it or not.

I was one of about five people in the company who really understood the nitty-gritty details of the software, so the responsibility fell on me. And here’s the kicker—I was grading my own team, who were trainers themselves, along with peer managers, my boss, other leaders, and even some friends. Talk about stress. And yeah, I still feel guilty that I might have been biased at times. I tried to be fair, but let’s face it, I wasn’t perfect. The exhaustion and personal connections I had with many of these people made it impossible to stay completely objective.

On top of that, grading wasn’t my main job, so other priorities kept popping up. Because of this, I couldn’t always provide feedback within the ideal five-day window after submissions. In fact, some people waited nearly 60 days for feedback because I was utterly burned out from reviewing those 6,750 videos. That’s it. No more.

And it’s not just my experience. Imagine a manager who has to manually grade quarterly performance reviews for a team of 50 people. Each employee submits their self-assessment along with peer feedback from five colleagues—resulting in 300 assessments to review. The manager tries to juggle this with their other responsibilities, fatigue sets in, and guess what? Bias creeps in. Maybe they’re more lenient with people they like or harsher with those they’ve had conflicts with. By the time they finish grading, weeks have passed, and the feedback is no longer timely or impactful. Sound familiar?

Both of these examples show just how flawed manual grading can be—bias is nearly impossible to avoid, and delayed feedback kills the effectiveness of assessments. That’s why I’m so pumped about what AI can do.

Instant, unbiased, relevant feedback? 

Yes, please. 

With AI, we’re stepping into a new era where feedback is timely, accurate, and tailored to each person’s learning style. This is a game-changer for training and development. That’s it. No more manual grading. I can’t wait to see just how far we can push this.