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Indiana First With Computerized Grading
Mz6 writes "Computerized grading has been talked about previously, however, the New York Times reports that Indiana has become the first state to grade high school English essays by computer. The computerized grading process, called 'e-rater', uses a 6-point rating scale and uses artificial intelligence to 'mimic the grading process of human readers'. The system was tested over a 2-year pilot program and produced results virtually identical to those of trained readers. The big question is, will other states begin to emulate Indiana by tossing human grading?"
it would have been my goal to make the most wrong essay I could that would still generate a good grade from the system.
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
I live in Indiana, and I have taken these. They are not graded fairly, and they determine 10% of the final grade. A computer can obviously not grade essays fairly, so it shouldn't be done. I got a 5/6, which, according to the computer, was extremely well. However, this was an 83%, which brought down my grade significantly. This computerized grading isn't fair at all.
SPAM filters are tricked all the time depending on the text of an email. Google was f'd up not too long ago because of trackback linking in blogs screwing up their algorithms. Isn't this a similar situation? If a student can figure out a way to beat the grader, we'll have students learning to write to beat software, not form a well written essay.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
My alma matter graded most of my computer programs with shell scripts and I graduated in 1997. So I don't think India is the first to do that.
I disagree. I see lawsuits as no more likely. Furthermore, any process where you're subjectively evaluting something there has to be quality controls and an appeals process. My wife once held a part time job grading essay questions on a high school exit exam. Every few hours of grading exams, she would have to take and pass a "calibration battery" of 10 exams. Quality control is fundamental to the process.
What I see as being problematic is kids learning to beat the system. Typically these systems are predicated on gramatical analysis (use of punctuation and sentence compeleteness) and evidence of citing the text the question is based off. I'd bet its a real easy system to beat.
bance.net
Indiana parents are the first to buy (en masse) licenses for Essay Constructor Pro v2.0. The software produces essays that are indistinguishable from those written by real students, using the latest screen-scrape-from-Internet 'n' plagiarism-from-non-credible-sources techniques.
Indiana Director of State Board of Ed comments: "Isn't it wonderful how technology is improving education?"
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Actually, I've been a part of writing software like this for their competitors and have worked with this software in the past as part of my duties as manager of development at the IUPUI Testing Center (thats Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis). We've worked on this shit for about 10 years now.
One of my tasks in the past was to push this type of software onto the local schools. We've used it for rating in class essays.
The idea is that everyone knows that the only way you get better writing is to write more and get some feedback on it. It doesn't matter if you are an educator throwing the papers back at the student or a computer algorithm. It all forces the student to find the mistakes and not make them the next time.
The problem isn't getting students to write more, its getting educators to grade more. There isn't enough hours in the day. So this is where this type of software comes into play -- you assign 2x the work you can normally handle, and let the computers handle half of it. You don't tell the students which assignments will be computer rated. Thus the students grades got better. Not much better, but they were better than the students not using the system in the same types of classes.
One of our smaller studies actually had us installing this software locally for instant feedback. It was a small percentage, but the students work was even better than before.
Yeah, you 'steal a copy' if you can't seem to get one given to you, and run it through until it likes it. How is this cheating or anyway underhanded. One of the better and far more dedicated educators I know actually allows students to hand in papers and have them marked up as many times as they want until the paper is due. His students final works are generally light years ahead of other educators in his facility that don't have the dedication (and for $26k a year, do you really want to give up your nights and weekends???).
Same thing here.
Shit, even using the grammar checker under work will force you to learn to write better (up to a point). You learn what its looking for and you avoid it. I'm not a good speller and I know the spell checkers help me learn after I hit the same error over and over again.
All these tools work for you in the learning process as long as you are willing to not just put this stuff on autopilot.
As for the title of this thread -- Lawsuit? The only lawsuits will come from idiots. None of the high stakes testing does purely computer rating. They all put humans into the equation. You will most likely get better rating because instead of having three or four humans look at your paper for 30 seconds each before moving on, you will now have one that is able to devote some serious time to it. All these humans will still be working just as many hours as before, but studies have shown that the eyeballs on the paper are there longer with this type of software than without (sorry, but these studies belong to the bigger testing companies or I'd post links...I just get paid to crunch the data).
Secondly, 5 years ago when I was working on this stuff full time, the software had a human agreeance of around 62% with a rater pool of 3 raters. Meaning that if you asked 3 people what they thought, took an average of this, and then asked a fourth, 62% of the time, the human agreed with the others. This was on a 12 point scale. The application, however, actually rated between 70 - 80% of the time depending on the model used.
In both cases, the raters were all trained together with the same things to look for, and the models were designed around this rater pool -- in a sense trying to simply guess at what the others would pick. The computer:human agreeance was higher than the human:human agreeance.
Back to the parent post, beating the system only means you beat learning to write.
BTW -- My post is not indicative of my writing skills outside of a conversational and informal setting, sans spell checker and proof re