Via Sean Harrington LinkedIn Post: I got a chance to talk to the amazing Chris Nicholson from OpenAI about the ways that we’re leveraging AI for education at OU Law and he wrote up a fantastic piece about how we’re using it, the challenges we’ve encountered, and some of the early wins. Super appreciative to be a member of their education forum for the last year, where I’ve gotten to have these types of conversations with people all around the world. With ChatGPT, law-school instructor Sean Harrington is rebuilding student assessment for the AI era.

Sean—who teaches students AI and law at the University of Oklahoma and holds both a JD and an MS in Data Analytics—saw a core problem the moment generative AI went mainstream: traditional take-home exams no longer reveal what students really know.

“Take‑home essays don’t work anymore,” he says.

His answer was to use ChatGPT to build a Socratic quizbot that runs live at the start of each class. Harrington uploads the week’s readings and the bot conducts a 10‑minute, one‑on‑one oral-style exchange with each student. No two quizzes are the same. Students type back and forth, ask for clarifications (“can you rephrase the question” or “please break this into steps”), and get grilled about how they should apply rules, distinguish cases, and reason through hypotheticals. The transcripts are then shared with Harrington, giving him a fine‑grained map of each student’s understanding. For example, when he saw the class’s intense curiosity about intellectual property, he added two weeks of IP focus to the syllabus—evidence that assessment can double as a real‑time feedback loop to tailor a curriculum. Sean also open‑sourced the quizbot on Github, inviting other legal educators to adapt and use it.

Harrington, who serves as Director of Technology and Innovation at OU’s school of law, has a remit that extends beyond the classroom. OU Law requires legal‑tech training across all three years, and he helps students build custom GPTs for studying: flashcards, practice essays, even culturally tuned analogies for international classmates. On the operations side, he’s helping other teams tackle complicated paperwork and other overhead. A “Sorting Hat”-like assistant assigns students to balanced cohorts or “houses” in the school in minutes rather than days. A scheduling helper ingests constraints like room sizes, faculty availability, enrollment caps, and then produces workable timetables with room assignments. For university funding proposals, he built a reusable assistant that aligns drafts to OU and College of Law strategic plans to clear bureaucratic gates.

For Sean, the throughline is pragmatic modernization: keep the pedagogical rigor while reducing the friction. Live, individualized Socratic quizzing preserves the formative stress test of law school while shifting it from public spectacle to more personalized engagement. Faculty gain visibility they never had; students gain agency and frequent, targeted challenges; and ChatGPT restores signal to assessment.

For Sean, AI isn’t a shortcut – it’s a precision instrument to provide students with a better education.

We provide ChatGPT to the students in certain courses for the semester but the Socratic Quizbot is open-source and can run on Ollama if you want to host locally (because I know how large, public schools are about FERPA): https://github.com/Digital-Initiative-OU-Law/SocraticQuizbot

They can even translate them to other languages, ask them to restate topics (e.g. “Give an analogy for someone who grew up in X,Y and has Z learning issues”) so the students have really appreciated the customization.

I hand-read every single one of their chat transcripts. It’s a small seminar class (~30) so it’s extra work but I’ve found it to be incredibly useful. I was able to triage areas where I could tell that the students were struggling and circle-back to fill in gaps and even added an additional module to the course because I could tell that the students cared deeply about issues that I had not planned to cover at any great depth. It’s an incredible way to keep your finger on the pulse of students. I could automate grading but I don’t think I will until it becomes too cumbersome because right now it is a very useful peak into the students’ minds. Regarding engagement: I just asked them and they were happy to explain how they felt about the process.