AI-assisted grading and personalized feedback in large political science classes: Results from randomized controlled trials
Tobias Heinrich, Sanghoon Park, Navida Wang, Spencer Baily, Jack DeOliveira
Available here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0328041
Grading and providing personalized feedback on short-answer questions is time consuming. Professional incentives often push instructors to rely on multiple-choice assessments instead, reducing opportunities for students to develop critical thinking skills. Using large-language-model (LLM) assistance, we augment the productivity of instructors grading short-answer questions in large classes. Through a randomized controlled trial across four undergraduate courses and almost 300 students in 2023/2024, we assess the effectiveness of AI-assisted grading and feedback in comparison to human grading. Our results demonstrate that AI-assisted grading can mimic what an instructor would do in a small class.
Ticket to Bribe: How Resource Characteristics Condition Organized Criminal Group Strategy (in progress)
Spencer Baily
Organized criminal groups (OCGs) target businesses, government employees and other groups. I argue that their strategy when confronting these different actors is based on the characteristics of the resource they which to exploit. For example, pipelines are immobile, visible, and require repeated access, groups must secure sustained cooperation. Where multiple groups compete, short time horizons encourage predatory extraction, making extortion and violence more attractive. When a single group consolidates control, longer time horizons favor stable arrangements that secure access while minimizing enforcement risk, making corruption more likely than extortion. Criminal organizations also differentiate targets, directing coercion toward private actors and corruption toward state officials and employees whose cooperation is necessary to govern fixed infrastructure. These expectations apply to immobile, state-owned, rent-generating resources more generally.
Here Comes the Funds: Industry Targeting by Organized Criminal Groups (in progress)
Spencer Baily
This paper argues that organized criminal groups (OCGs) strategically target municipal construction spending following negative economic shocks, using extortion to capture newly concentrated public rents. While most existing research examines how armed actors respond to commodity price shocks or natural resource windfalls, this study shifts the focus to a specific industry sector, municipal construction, that becomes vulnerable due to discretionary, project-based government spending. I argue that post-shock public works programs generate visible, localized, and time-bound cash flows that are especially susceptible to criminal capture in contexts of weak municipal oversight. Unlike diversification into new illicit markets, extortion allows groups to rapidly and cheaply monetize these state-generated rents without expanding their organizational structure. By highlighting how sector-specific government interventions can unintentionally reshape criminal incentives, the paper extends the literature beyond commodity-driven conflict and demonstrates how the design of public spending programs influences patterns of organized criminal violence.
Sustaining Rebellion: Resources and Rebel Conservation (in progress)
Kenneth Aba, Spencer Baily, Chelsea Estancona
This research project examines the conditions under which rebel groups attempt to sustain consistent levels of funding from limited, yet renewable resources. We investigate when and why rebels sustainably extract these important assets. In our paper, we argue that groups that exhibit state-like behavior will be more inclined to also sustainably extract resources due to their interest in gaining support from civilians and in maintaining other operations. It is also important for groups that rely on the local population for labor to restrict their practices.
Research Assistant
1. Summer 2023: I reviewed and coded data for Lindsay Reid and Chelsea Estancona for a paper on pro-government militias and peace deals.
2. Summer 2022: I conducted a literature review for Matthew Wilson and Amanda Edgell on election management bodies (EMBs) in all forms of government.
Skills
– R
– Latex
– Python
– Microsoft Office Suite
– Econometrics
Spencer Baily 