DETAILED ACTION
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-10 and 13-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 as being directed to ineligible subject matter.
Regarding claim 1, the claim is directed to a method, which is a statutory category of subject matter. However, it must be considered whether or not the claim is directed to a judicial exception to subject matter eligibility. In this instance, the claim is directed to an abstract idea, as is described below.
Claim 1 is directed to a method for automatic grading of an essay, wherein an essay is submitted with information comprising various identification information about the user, the lesson, the student and their competency level, a lesson objective and a lesson passage. Evaluation rubrics indexed by grade level are selected. The information is collated into a structure for evaluation, and sent to the system for evaluation. Evaluation information is received and presented to the user, and added to the structure.
The above steps are performed on a computer system with data requests and files, and also the evaluation is performed by a LLM with prompts.
The computer elements claimed, operate on standard computer systems, as descried on page 12 of applicant’s specification, and are standard computer functions, such as i/o, data storage, display, processing, etc. These computer limitations do not themselves add significantly more to the claims, as the main method is directed to the human elements of the claims, such as providing the essay and various criterion for evaluation and receiving a response based on the criterion. These steps are abstract in that they are directed to a human teaching process, which is an established item in the judicially identified category of abstract ideas referred to as ‘the organization of human activity’. Because the broader aspect of the claim is disembodied from the computer, i.e. could be generally performed with the human mind, manual record-keeping, etc., it is not considered to be embodied in a practical application. Thus claim 1 is not patent eligible under 35 U.S.C. 101. The same is true for claims 8-9, which comprise the same general limitations only in apparatus form.
Claims 2-4, 6-7, and 14-15, are further definitions of the rubrics and so forth, including student academic grade level, character counts, acceptable criteria, previous essays for training, etc. These are the elements provided to the system as rubric criterion for grading, and are a part of the abstract human process and do not render the system patent eligible.
Regarding claims 5 ,10, and 13, the use of databases and GUIs, as well as various modules and processors, is standard computer usage, and does not add significantly more to the claims, or embody them in a practical application, as described with regard to the other computer elements of claims 1 and 8.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 11-12 are objected to as depending from a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten to include the base claim and any intervening claims. The prior art does not teach or suggest the claimed configuration specifics of claim 11.
Conclusion
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TIMOTHY A. MUSSELMAN
Primary Examiner
Art Unit 3715
/TIMOTHY A MUSSELMAN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3715
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