The People Behind the Score

Why professors built this

We have spent our careers teaching undergraduates, and after December 2022 we watched the same thing happen to our own courses. The take-home essay stopped measuring what it used to measure. The proctored exam did not. Two students could finish a degree with identical GPAs and one of them had been genuinely tested and the other had not, and nothing on either transcript said which was which.

Nobody was going to fix that from inside a university. Grading standards are set course by course, and transcripts were never designed to record how a grade was earned. So we built the record that was missing: a report that reads the actual syllabus behind every course on a transcript and states how much of that GPA came from work AI could not have done.

The team

REALdegrees was founded by three professors: Matthew DiGiuseppe, Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, and Babak Rezaee Daryakenari. Between them they have spent more than 35 years teaching university students, both internationally and within the US. Matthew earned his PhD at Binghamton University, spent six years on the faculty at the University of Mississippi, and has served in education leadership roles since. Jonah earned his doctorate at Yale and taught at the University of Virginia and Harvard's Kennedy School. Babak earned his PhD at Arizona State University and has graduate training in mathematics and data science. Our collective experience is the working knowledge behind the report we provide for you.

• Dr. Matthew DiGiuseppe →
• Dr. Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl →
• Dr. Babak Rezaee Daryakenari →

How the reports are made

The faculty team writes and revises the rubric; software applies it identically to every syllabus; people resolve the edge cases and release the reports. The full process, including what the score is and is not, is written up at realdegrees.ai/methodology.