The world’s first truly global AI crisis came at a time when no one expected. In the summer of 2020, after college exams were cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions, tens of thousands of students received nonsensical grades, which were determined using undisclosed AI models trained on the class of 2020 and prior years students’ data. Few things mattered more in life than where one went to college, and for many young people, their career, relationships, network, income, and, generally speaking, life was to be determined by what the UK’s prime minister Boris Johnson labeled as the “mutant algorithm.” Much like COVID-19 itself, this situation was repeated nearly identically in multiple countries, but the first instance of the crisis was with the International Baccalaureate Organization headquartered in Switzerland, which, on July 5, 2020, was the first to release its grades before individual countries released theirs. This public-sourced case examines the grading scandal, how it happened, and how it affected students worldwide.
