Introducing AAVA

AAVA  is a virtual assistant designed to respond to your questions about Assessment Adjustments. 

Please type your question when prompted in the pop-up screen and AAVA will respond.

AAVA can help with your Assessment Adjustments questions and direct you to raise a request. 

If you have questions relating to this service or any other aspect of University life, academic or wellbeing support, please use Ask a Question to be signposted to the right support.

You can ask AAVA for support with Assessment Adjustment requests.  AAVA can currently ONLY assist with Assessment Adjustment questions.

Example questions:

-  How do I make an Assessment Adjustment request?
-  What are the possible adjustments available?
-  What are the deadlines for adjustment requests?
-  Are my circumstances eligible for an assessment adjustment?
-  Do I need to provide evidence for my request?

AAVA is a virtual assistant digital tool based on the knowledge articles available on Ask a Question knowledge bank and Essentials the student website. 

The LLM (Large Language Model) used to enable the tool is a ring-fenced LLM. A ring-fenced LLM is a large language model that operates within a secure and isolated environment, ensuring that no third-party has access to the model's data. AAVA can learn from your responses and your chat history. No third party is able to access that chat history without the strict permission of the University of Reading and that data is never shared outside of our secure environment. Your data is stored in compliance with data protection regulations and will never be sold or used to train other AI models. 

Most AI tools are designed to always respond regardless of how confident they are in the accuracy of their answer.  So, they are more likely to give a best guess rather than answer 100% factually.
We have reduced the confidence thresholds on AAVA to ensure a higher likelihood of a correct answer.  This means that if AAVA is not confident in providing a correct answer, it will present a natural sense of uncertainty rather than guessing. This may be expressed in an 'I don't know' response.

If you are unsatisfied with the responses you have received using AAVA, please send your request to Ask a Question where our Support team will get back to you.