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."'"

Comments

Fine for help, but...

[Faust7]

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.

Let us not forget our great achievements

[mao che minh]

We have had Dali, Sagan, Kip Thorne, Hawkin, Poe, Twain, Sigmund Frued, Einstein, Torvalds, et cetera. The great minds that you mentioned were indeed great, but if you place their philosophical or artistic achievements next to the great minds of our past century and a half, I find them equal.

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.

Re:Interesting..

[Zork the Almighty]

"That's really not the case, because we're not talking about eliminating the human element. We're making the process more efficient."

I love this quote in particular because it has to be the most disingenious claim one could make. The entire act of making something a process, and then making that process more efficient IS "removing the human element". It's the type of subtle point that would be completely missed by, say, a computer grading system.

Re:Go to a better school.

[shepd]

>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).