LaTA — FERPA-safe LLM autograder for STEM courses
MIT researchers built an open-source autograder that runs locally on standard hardware, keeping student work on-premises and compliant with FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).
LaTA (LaTeX Teaching Assistant) ingests assignments in LaTeX, segments them, grades via a 120B open-weight chain-of-thought LLM, and compares output to instructor reference solutions — no third-party APIs, no data exposure.
Designed as a drop-in tool for engineering and physics courses already using LaTeX workflows; eliminates the need to rewrite assignments for cloud graders.