“Humans code these systems. Humans are encoding their own biases into these algorithms,” said Yasmeen Musthafa, a Ph.D. student in plasma physics at the University of California, Irvine, who rang alarm bells about the system on Twitter. “What would UT Austin CS department have looked like without GRADE? We’ll never know.” GRADE (which stands for GRaduate ADmissions Evaluator) was created by a UT faculty member and UT graduate student in computer science, originally to help the graduate admissions committee in the department save time. GRADE predicts how likely the admissions committee is to approve an applicant and expresses that prediction as a numerical score out of five. The system also explains what factors most impacted its decision. The UT researchers who made GRADE trained it on a database of past admissions decisions. The system uses patterns from those decisions to calculate its scores for candidates. https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/12/14/u-texas-will-stop-using-controversial-algorithm-evaluate-phd
