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Essay Grading Software For Teachers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sounds-better-my-12th-grade-teacher dept.

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."'"

8 of 535 comments (clear)

  1. When a judge is made of silicon by mao+che+minh · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I don't like it. Part of the learning experience, especially in the subjects of arts and philosophy, is being judged by another human being (or group of human beings) and having your work subject to their myriad of emotions and intellectual whims. A system like Criteria removes the very complex aspect of education: the human mind.

    Without computers we wouldn't be advancing in science, astronomy, genetics, or mathematics as rapidly as we have been in recent years. They are wonderful things. Hell, computers even help me keep a roof over my head. But I don't want Hal judging my kid's school papers.

    1. Re:When a judge is made of silicon by dolo666 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I tend to disagree. By eliminating the time it takes to grade papers, professors have many more hours to spend with students *doing* the humanizing. I'm a teacher, and any teacher worth their salt will know if the machine is wrong, because they'll know their students, and what each one deserves (without even reading the damn papers they at least know what to expect, so if the machine is off, they will know). Now for higher level papers, such as university level papers, the machines should be only used as a guide, like comment moderation at slashdot. Not all the moderation is in fact, correct, and I'm sure that profs will also know that the same is true with these devices.

  2. New York Times articles by Vic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sorry for the off-topic post.... but since Slashdot links to so many NYT articles, they should look into getting a partner=SLASHDOT thing (like Google does).

  3. Whoa wait up by tomstdenis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So when a student gets a C on an essay to whom does he/she seek redress?

    Teachers make mistakes and occasionally mark something negatively that was misread or misunderstood. In those cases the student can talk to the teacher and make a case.

    If a computer does the marking though what do they do?

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  4. What's next? by mao+che+minh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The fun they had

  5. Using a bayesian spam classifier for this? by stere0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This thing compares the essays it is supposed to grade with already graded papers in its database. Couldn't this be done with something like POPFile? It isn't only a spam/ham classifier and lets you create as many "buckets" as you want (e.g. work, family, spam, mailing lists and system monitoring).

    You could, in theory, create only buckets named (A...F), feed a large number of essays to it, make it "learn" how the essays are classified using statistics, and let it grade essays for you after that.

    Is it possible to find masses of graded essays online? This would be a fun thing to try :).

    --
    Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
  6. Scary: by afidel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This sounds a lot like This story.

    Actually this sounds a lot like Gramatica. Gramatica was the grammer checker that was an optional component with WordPerfect for DOS and later a standard component with the Windows version. It was written by a team comprised of both computer scientists and professors of English. One of the interesting features was the scoring feature which would give you a rough estimate of the grade level of your writing. It would also give you statistics and compare them to a selection of famous works.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  7. Sausage by quintessencesluglord · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Something hinted at by the story and some of the comments but really bears being pendantic: too few teachers. It is lucridous to expect a teacher to go over 150 essays as it is for me to expect getting a reasonable education when I am 1 of 150 faces trying to gleen something more than an "A" from a class. The software is attempting to address this imbalance, but ultimately it will make the level of education worse: it can grade a paper, it can't offer insights on how to improve. And it will give administrators a reason to pile 50 more into a class, which will in turn lead to GradeStar MkII and onward into a vicious circle. And yeah, the software is just a tool, but like so many tools, that's not how it will be utilized. It's a cop-out, nothing more.