Anant Agarwal to Head AI Grading Company

Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor, founder of edX, and recipient of the 2016 Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education, has been named Chief Executive Officer of Grady, an AI grading and feedback platform.

“Grady holds every student to the instructor’s standard, and it keeps the instructor in charge. It effectively supercharges faculty and teaching assistants,” said Agarwal, who has served as both an advisor and board member to Grady and will now lead the company.

Agarwal joins Grady from 2U, where he served as Chief Academic Officer, following 2U’s acquisition of edX in 2021. Agarwal founded edX, a leading global online learning platform that connects tens of millions of learners with programs from top universities and institutions worldwide, in 2012.

The appointment connects one of the leading figures in online education with a startup set on tackling a particularly labor-intensive part of teaching: grading student assignments and delivering individualized feedback.

Explaining his interest in Grady, Agarwal said: "I have spent much of my career trying to democratize education. Assessment and feedback are core components of learning, and we have never been able to scale them without giving something up." 

Grady was founded by Rutgers University Professor Periklis Papakonstantinou and University of Illinois Chicago Professor Anastasios Sidiropoulos. The company says its technology can apply an instructor’s grading criteria consistently throughout an entire course.

In 2016, Agarwal was awarded the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education for his outstanding leadership in the development of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement, which has helped make possible the education of millions of students around the world.

Now Agarwal sees AI’s potential to further support his mission of education for all. After using Grady to evaluate his own MIT coursework, including handwritten assignments, diagrams and sketches, he said, he was “blown away.” During his 36 years teaching at MIT, Agarwal said he had devoted “untold hours” to grading assignments, evaluating student work and preparing course materials.

Grady “could be transformational,” said Agarwal, who will continue as a professor at MIT, where he has taught for nearly four decades and previously served as the director of the computer science and AI lab.