2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen a sharp increase in availability, adoption, and implementation in academia and industry. One of AI’s biggest opportunities is its ability to automate functions that are time consuming and mundane. The promise of AI is that it can do more and with some of the latest tools, higher level tasks are being targeted for automation. In this paper, AI is utilized in an engineering economics course in order to assist the instructor with providing more accurate and timely feedback to their students on their written assignments in the course. This automation is performed using a locally hosted Large Language Model (LLM) to provide feedback based on rubrics developed for the assignments in this course. The expected outcomes are a measure of the feedback to the students being accurate and a reduction in the instructor’s workload while still providing meaningful assignments that contribute to the student’s learning in the course.