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Essay Grading Software For Teachers
asjk writes "Software to help teachers with grading has been around for sometime. This is true even with respect to grading essays. A new tool, called Criteria, will look at grammar, usage, and even style and organization. It works by being trained by at least 450 essays scored by two professionals. The difference this time? Here is a snip from the article: '"There's a lot of skepticism," Dr. Spatola said. "The people opposed see it dehumanizing the student's papers, putting them through some sort of mechanical, computerized system like the multiple choice tests. That's really not the case, because we're not talking about eliminating the human element. We're making the process more efficient."'"
that they've automated away a major part of a professors job, while we still need humans to pick spinach and deliver pizzas.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
I thought the point of an essay was to grade the ideas and how well they're expressed. I didn't realize they were spelling/grammar tests.
Maybe I'm just a bit jaded by this because of all the stupid grammar and spelling nitpicking that goes on here on Slashdot. Evidentally, it's much easier to criticize my spelling than it is to provided a rebuttal to my point.
"Derp de derp."
1 - the grammar check option in MS word is crap. this sounds awfully similar.
2 - your resume can suck, but with the proper buzz words, it'll come out looking like gold to those automated resume checkers.
1+2 = students who turn in good papers that aren't structured perfectly (and you have to admit, there is some fluidity to language) will get marked down, and those who know what bullet points to put in their papers will get good marks, even though the content is crap.
How long until you get kids selling manuals in the bathroom on what the machina are looking for?
--I don't want the world, I just want your half.
I bet that I can write a paper that satisfies this application's conditions for correctness of grammar, usage, style and organization, but is completely and utterly meaningless.
Then, let's feed this thing Ulysses and let's see how high it grades Joyce.
Anybody who can't see that this thing is useless for promoting any sort of creativity among students is off their rocker.
As long as this is merely an assistant and not the end-all be-all, as long as actual qualified instructors review the essay after this program does, I'm all for it.
The English language is so full of subtleties, nuances, combinations, and fantastic structural intracacies that make phenomenal writing in it possible (Faulkner, Bradbury, etc.). There's a reason English is a field of study for graduate degrees: it's absolutely worthy of them. There is no subsitute for the educated, refined judgment of someone who is exceedingly well-versed in the language.
The coolest voice ever.
There is no "humanity" in a modern constructed essay. There are certainly going to be "judgement calls" when standards are not as fully fleshed out for the computer as they should be, but as long as those are appealable, I have no problem having a computer assign me the other 95% of my essay points. The only instructors who will fear this are those who like to assign grades arbitrarily. And I don't feel too sympathetic toward those people.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
If the poem's score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.
A sonnet by Byron may score high on the vertical, but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great. As you proceed through the poetry in this book, practice this rating method. As your ability to evaluate poems in this matter grows, so will - so will your enjoyment and understanding of poetry.
(From the full script.
bash$
is just one of many writers who would flunk using this system.
'Nuff said.
Sounds like everyone feels the same way too... We've got some automated testing software for MS Office at the local college and although it's getting better, it still makes really silly mistakes from time to time. Analyzing English composition has got to be many times more difficult than watching a bunch of clicks and key presses.
The only use I can see for this thing is as a "first pass" grading tool that quickly finds obvious mistakes (spelling, grammer, redundancy, etc) and flags them for the instructor. On the other hand, it's probably just as time consuming for the instructor to read over the flagged items as it is to just catch them on the first time reading through the paper.
As far as the achievements of ancient cultures go, it is all relative. We have harnessed fusion, mapped the genome, created antibiotics, peered deep into the hearts of galaxies a 100,000,000 light years away, forged fiber optics, designed the integrated circuit, et cetera. People three hundred years from now will look back upon us and wonder how a civilization that could barely put a man on the moon (a feat that will surely be trivial to them) was able to usher in the Information Age in only a decade worth of work.
One of the primary purposes of essays are to learn how to write for a specific audience.
If you remove the human element, then you aren't writing for any audience, unless, of course, everyone starts writing for computers' entertainment and education.
>the job of highschool should be to get a student into the best college/university possible
NO!
That's the problem right there.
Highschool should be to prepare you for the real world (ie: A job, life, maybe marriage).
University is there to prepare you for a lifetime of learning on a subject.
Instead, we have employers that require university educations for secretaries. It's insane, wrong, and needs to stop if we expect everyone in society to be useful (and they ARE, it's just that stupid employers use university education as a filter).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Now before you start up the flame throwers, this is not a message to deride high school students over their lack of creativity.
But when I was in high school, we were told that proper essay writing was an essential skill for the departmentals, and when they said "proper," they meant "Must conform to between five and seven paragraphs, with the first and last being this opening and conclusion with three to five paragraphs of body--each containing one topic of discussion."
Furthermore, it was made VERY clear that creative or unconventional ideas (let alone language!) would be strongly frowned upon. There was One True Way to write an essay, and One True Opinion on any given subject. Any deviations from that would cost you.
I hated it then, I hate it now, but I don't see any problem with having computers mark essays like this. After all, they were trying to turn us into computers to create them.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The funny thing about this is that, if the essay is graded by computer, the best way to write the essay would be to have the COMPUTER write it. The same criteria that the program would use to grade the essay could very easily be turned around and used to generate an essay that the computer will love. Having a computer written term paper given an A by a computer grader is worthy of an Ionesco play.
Beyond that there is no way the computer will be able to distinguish between something truly interesting and something that just lists the facts in simple Dick and Jane language with an occasional compund sentence to keep the grammar checker happy. All it can do is check for fact1, fact2, fact3, and any interesting conclusion you draw in the paper will be completely lost. Anything more would be turing test worthy, and I heartily doubt they've achieved anything close to that.
Elegant prose is often not strictly grammatical, so a boring paper would likely score the same or better than a far better written essay with the same facts. I routinely turn off grammar checking in every program I've ever used it in. Aside from the occasional misplaced modifier or dangling participle, its worthless.
In conclusion, this idea is a pipe dream which would discourage high quality writing (i.e. the kind actual PEOPLE like to read), teach people the substandard grammatical constructs used by most grammar checking software, and create a market for software that writes term papers, thereby removing the last actual bit of work your average liberal arts major has to do. I think it's a hopelessly terrible idea. TA's already do this work; why waste time coming up with a program which will do the same thing, poorly?
Just my opinion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.