With recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), there has been growing interest in using state of the art (SOTA) AI solutions to provide assistance in grading handwritten answer sheets. While a few commercial products exist, the question of whether AI-assistance can actually reduce grading effort and time has not yet been carefully considered in published literature. This work introduces an AI-assisted grading pipeline. The pipeline first uses text detection to automatically detect question regions present in a question paper PDF. Next, it uses SOTA text detection methods to highlight important keywords present in the handwritten answer regions of scanned answer sheets to assist in the grading process. We then evaluate a prototype implementation of the AI-assisted grading pipeline deployed on an existing e-learning management platform. The evaluation involves a total of 5 different real-life examinations across 4 different courses at a reputed institute; it consists of a total of 42 questions, 17 graders, and 468 submissions. We log and analyze the grading time for each handwritten answer while using AI assistance and without it. Our evaluations have shown that, on average, the graders take 31% less time while grading a single response and 33% less grading time while grading a single answer sheet using AI assistance.

本研究针对现有文献中尚未充分探讨的人工智能（AI）辅助批改手写答案卷的有效性，提出了一种AI辅助批改的流程。通过在真实考试中评估该流程的实施，结果表明使用AI辅助可以显著降低批改时间，平均节省31%的单个回答批改时间及33%的单个答案卷的批改时间，显示出其潜在影响和实用价值。

人工智能辅助能否帮助批改手写答案卷？