Slashdot Mirror
Computer Program Makes Essay Grading Easier
phresno writes "c|Net is running a short article on Prof. Bent at the Columbia, Mo., University. The Prof. has developed a computer program which he now uses to grade his sociology students' essays. He claims the program can discern content, and argument flow within sentence and paragraph structure, and has saved him over two hundred hours of reading per semester. How long before he's replaced entirely by his own program to cut down on staff costs?"
How long until some students get hold of this program and tweak their essay until it's puifect? It's similar to spammers using spam filters to test their emails first.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Now some students will write a paper generating program that'll pass his grading program.
I'm not so sure I like the idea of a computer grading my work.. I spent hours making it, but the guy doesn't even give it the time of day....
Angst
"The program analyzes sentence and paragraph structure and can ascertain the flow of arguments and ideas."
So it measures structure and argument.
How's it going to measure creativity of thought? Are we going to just pump out logic machines from colleges?
What the hell are his sucker students paying him for then? Post secondary education is such a scam. Just a giant business hiding under the fluffy guise of altruism. Gimme a break.
The only way that a computer program can possibly analyze a paper fully as a paper is if it read it as a human. heuristic algorithms, however sophisticated, just aren't enough for things of this sort of importance--after all, the profs are paid to grade (well, them or the grad students). It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to just throw in keywords and make sure that you use proper syntax in order to fool this thing, albeit the prof says keywords alone aren't enough. I find the claim that his program can "analyze argument flow" quite dubious. I'll stick to getting my several grands' worth out of my courses, thank you very much.
That's Brent, not Bent. Of course, that would have required some editing...
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Now if we could code a program to write those essays, the whole process would be automated. Press enter for another A. If you know how the program grades the essays, it should be possible to write a program that generates essays that comply perfectly to those rules, right?
Edward BRENT, not Bent. Cripes, get the man's name right.
Brent said he plans to donate 1 percent of profits generated through the sale of the program to the World Wildlife Fund.
I don't think one percent really puts this guy in the big-league of philanthropy.
No more bullshitting papers at 3 o clock in the morning, guess i'll have to push it back to around midnight when I start for just that extra edge.
Undergrad professors are usually not too excited about teaching these 18 year-old pizza-faced dorks. The problem is that the kids would rather be out drinking and screwing rather than debating the intricacies of pre vs post agrarian culture in the Southern States and the relationship between that and race relations as they exist today.
So more power to him. He is unlikely to be getting anything better or more insightful than a parroting of what he has already delivered in his monologues to his class. Same papers, year in and year out. No big deal to grade these kids with an automated program.
I can't believe the program can measure the absolutely complexity and dense empty prose of sociology. Bravo good man!
Lazy bastard.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If a program is really good enough to mark an essay, then reversing the function should allow it to create an essay that is perceived by human assessors to be of good quality. And I suspect we are a long was away from that.
Has this guy even assessed the correlation between the marks the program gives and the marks he would give?
about the feel of Sociology? :P
Sure, you could be great at grammar and sentence structure. You could be an ace at using proper english.
But how would hidden talent and creativity be found? How will the teacher know if his students are actually trying hard to write their papers when all he does is check the thing with a computer program?
It's a really terrible idea and I think it's really cheezy. Ohh, he saved some time. So does that mean he now gets paid less? Does this automation get the students a discount? Yea, right.
If I'm going to put a lot of work into writing an interesting paper about something, I want someone to read it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Now all the people who seem to think they need to spend 4 hours coloring borders and using alternating pink and purple pens arent going to get any extra marks.
Are we trying to strip the creative juices away from people, and actually require them to write a good essay?
"Long live black system font on white paper!"
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
Editors, please respect my alma mater and use the right name. Is it asking too much to check?
I would be more impressed if he had come up with a way to get rid of the parroting and got his students to write some original stuff. But I'm not a college professor so what do I know about education.
Look Tom Landauer's work at University of Colorado.
It makes more sense than you'd think: it turns out that knowledgable essays in a particular domain cluster statistically in useful ways. Yes, it does mean that something like Molly Bloom's Soliloquy wouldn't necessarily score very well, but then if you didn't know it wsa a Nobel Prize winning classic, would you think it was well written?
How much does it cost for the Students' Essay Generator version?
What does this say about the field of Sociology? :P
Didn't the Jetsons already have this? :)
And where the hell's my fold-up flying car...
FWIW, this prof is at the University of Missouri (in Columbia, MO).
Gee - you'd think the submitter could RTFA...
The guy probably has tenure, and will never be replaced by his own program. Also, there's a lot more to being a professor than interacting with students/grading their papers.
They might quit hiring grad students as TA's, though...
A program to do a sociology professor's job? I can do that.
(defun grade-essay (essay)
'A)
... but costs $400 a copy. Software developed with NSF (taxpayer) money should have to be open source!
Why not give the program to the English department and use it for teaching?
Would be great for high-school students. Have students write an essay or paper and analyze it right in front of them. Then the program highlights their errors (or what the program perceives as an error). Even better, complaining students would help fix bugs in the software because they know their intent - they could send off a highlighted error-ridden version to the developers with an explanation of why they think they are right.
Better yet, give it to everyone! It's not like you can cheat, you still have to rewrite and resubmit your papers. Shit, I say build it into text boxes on slashdot and wikipedia to start!
please do not hold this post to the standard of the Qualrus (real page of the software)
Get your Unix fortune now!
Rip-off merchant.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It works by scanning text for keywords, phrases and language patterns.
Which is to say, this prof is asking students to regurgitate data. Given, a certain level of base knowledge is necessary in any class and topic, and regurgitation (aka parroting) is an easy way to check that base knowledge. If a paper is assigned on a particular topic that they've been studying, then this sort of program can easily check for base level ability to spit back key words and phrases.
But, I seriously doubt that the class is ONLY about that base knowledge -- or that the program can reasonably check for anything more. I've had classes where the prof or graders did basically the same thing that this program does (i.e. check only for key words, phrases, and patterns they want to see), and I have little respect for those profs.
If you don't want to put even a basic amount of effort into checking a paper, don't assign it -- find some better way to check students' progress.
he most likely still has to proof-read them if a student is not happy with his grade.
that make me hate post secondary institutions more and more. Its simply more of a monopoly than it is to help society progress. So you pay thousands of dollars a year only to be taught by a student teacher and now professors wont even go through essays ? Say what you wish about universities but the fact remains that its a bit overated and in some cases not worth the investement.
This one is just nuts. Why on earth am I writing essays which are going to be marked automatically by a machine? It's bad enough that scantron cards have found their way into subjects where they're totally irrelevant (a multiple-choice test for a university level Shakespeare course?), this is just another reason why post-secondary education has become increasingly less complete.
If he's allowed to use a machine to save him the effort of reading an essay, I should be able to use a machine so I don't have to go through the effort of writing one. Trust me, as arduous as it is to read a 20 page essay on the relative merits of liquid rubber concrete compound fasteners, writing it takes a lot more effort, a lot more time, and it damn well deserves to be read by the professor who assigned it.
Just wanted to point out that the software was created originally for the purpose of qualitative coding. Grading essays is one of several other applications it has proved capable of addressing.
So the 1% of us who go to college because we enjoy learning about our field should just drop out and go drink and screw. I see.
As a student at Mizzou, I've got to say this is a complete non-issue. I hadn't even heard of this until it showed up on the front page, and I've worked extensively with the campus media.
Yes, its cool - if it really works.
But just how subjective is it? Can it vary its level of criticality, or are all papers graded against a rigid standard? There's little doubt that setting a single bar will lead to problems - both with students never being able to write well enough, and with students who write far above that bar.
I think it's great the program is around; put it out there, give it to the writing improvement center and the Campus Writing Project, let people test their drafts against it. But use it as a learning & improvement tool, not just an automatic grader. That's what TA's are for.
I was required to take a lot of writing classes for my college (and still haven't finished them all) and I've observed the quality of my writing go up appreciably since I began school. However, the reason I've become a better writer is because my essay graders write copious comments about where I'm going wrong in my papers and what I should do to improve - and they read the next paper I write for the class with those things in mind, and tell me whether I've improved sicne the last one.
The article didn't say anything about what kind of feedback the program provides, but I can't imagine it's anywhere near as helpful as the paragraph-long evaluations of my logic, style, and structure, which I got back with every paper I ever turned in, and I'd be impressed but surprised if his program took each student's previous weaknesses into account in the course of the evaluation. In writing, practicing can only do so much - the real help is in constructive feedback, and I just can't imagine where these students are getting it if not from the human graders of their papers.
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We all ready have machines to grade test. I forgot what you call them but you fill in the dots with a pencil and the teacher uses a machine to grade it.
Other than that any thing more complicated then multiple choice or True or false requires the intellect and judgment of a human mind that no program will ever be able to do.
According to ETS, the e-rater agrees with the human grader 98% of the time.
My userid is prime!
It seems like, instead of creating computer programs to grade essays, perhaps the schools should, you know, hire more teachers or pay the ones they have better! Couldn't this guy just hire a human assistant? There are plenty of people out there with education degrees who would enjoy having his job.
He is unlikely to be getting anything better or more insightful than a parroting of what he has already delivered in his monologues to his class.
Perhaps he would get more then parroting if he encouraged more and used a marking system that rewarded those who did. I use to put a lot of effort into my assignments, and I'd get good marks. Now I put so-so effort into them and guess what, I get the same marks. The system doesn't encourage effort.
APRIL FOOLS!!! ... oh wait, its the 4th... nevermind
The computer-generated scores count for about a third to a quarter of students' final grade for Brent's class. Students have challenged the scores, but if they don't use the right lingo in their papers, they're out of luck. "In sociology, we want them to learn the terms," Brent said.
It disturbs me that this program was actually approved for school wide use. Yes, yes. Never mind the content or the thoughts expressed in the paper. We just want you to use buzzwords.
This automatic grading business is not the only thing that bugs me. I have friends in college who are afraid to express their true opinion in their writing for classes because their professors have been known to flunk papers that don't agree with their personal views.
Can someone please explain to me why college is important again?
-R
I would be more impressed if he had come up with a way to get rid of the parroting and got his students to write some original stuff.
Give failing marks to those who parrot and give high marks for those who write "some original stuff."
Don't need to be a brain surgeon to create such a system.
For this argument assume the following...
"English" teachers mean those that mark essays, stories and the like
"other" teachers are math, science, geography, and others that rely more on the formulae or understanding of principals.
How long until the "other" (non-english-type) teachers want a rais for doing more work then the "english" teachers. Since you know "english" teachers won't take a pay cut just because thier workload got reduced.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
The prof got an NSF grant to write a program, and now is going to charge people for that. NSF should force CC and GPL for all work products as part of the grant. Why did I pay taxes for him to get a hand out to turn around an charge me for access.
I tested Pro Brent's essay grading program with my essay grading program grader. It discerned content, paragraph structure,argument flow, and monthly flow. After long seconds of calculations and two reboots, I recieved the answer of "49"
From TFA, which apparently no one has read yet:
"The final papers, which he does read, are usually much better as a result of Qualrus, too."
There you go! For the reading and comprehension impaired, here's a summary of what's actually happening, which even the reporter didn't get:
1. Students write a draft of their essay, which they then upload via a Web form to this program
2. The program gives them a score on various parts of their essay, giving them valuable feedback on what needs to be improved.
3. Students improve the pieces of their essay that the program suggests.
4. Students submit the final draft to the professor, who reads and grades each one by hand. Due to steps 1-3, the quality of the final draft is much higher.
This sounds like a great thing to me. Wish I had something similar for my students. I don't have the time to read through dozens of drafts for every student. Too bad I'm not in sociology.
Suppose you have a stack of papers to grade. Even a simple tool (not really a big step beyond spelling and grammar checkers) could help to triage the papers.
Then you can skim the bad papers looking for redeeming ideas, read the good papers in detail looking for reasons not to give top marks, and read the middle papers with an eye to both.
Of course once you've done this once for a given class, you can probably pre-bin them by who wrote them...
I don't know about about agrarian culture, but I do know I paid good money to be properly taught the fundamentals of my field. Those fundamentals are the basis for ALL that follows in an engineering program, and you are seriously F'd later on if you don't have an intimate understanding. I worked my ass off to attend university, and I damn well expected to be taught.
There is a certain degree of acceptance of this attitude in academia and it DISGUSTS me.
I can't speak for others, but I know that this just sickens me. A computer program cannot understand ideas yet; nor can it make adjustments for less than perfect mastery of the english language.
Perhaps he should commision an optical recognition system, so he can automatically measure the margins and line spacing.
I'd love to get a copy of this program so it could be demonstrated how badly it could be gamed. In fact, if this person was so confident he was basing his marks on it, maybe he should share this teaching wonder with the world.
..don't panic
Actually Ed Brent encourages his students to use Qualrus on earlier drafts of the papers. This provides immediate, extensive feedback. And by "extensive" I mean more detailed and descriptive comments than those that a single teacher/TA could supply for each and every paper in a large lecture. The immediacy of this feeback is what is really important - immediacy is KEY to learning.
...some of my humanities professors. Sometimes I would write and rewrite and end up with a B. Other times, I wait until the last minute and make up some bull**** and I get an A. At least with this program you know what you're getting...
Perhps here is a case where it works.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
There's a much easier way. Think about it: There are six letter grades, right? A,B,C,D,E and F.
A D6 has six side, and only takes a couple seconds to roll. Heck, you can batch roll them, if you want.
36D6 = marks for your whole class. Tah-dah!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Can you imagine it being used to grade a paper on something like cyberspeak?
"You got an F. You were going to get a near perfect grade for your frequent use of direct quotes but it turns out our sentence structure and grammar were terrible and your logical flow was next-to-non-existant."
and dispense with moderation. Just have a perl script determine if a post is insightful, funny, redundant or troll.
Now that I think about it, I would just be thankful if they integrated a simple spelling and grammer checker for the editors.
What's the big deal? Automated scoring of essays is nothing new.
http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P98/P98-1032.pdf
How long until a student specially crafts a paper which causes a buffer-overflow, followed by code to install spyware which makes all his papers recieve a perfect grade?
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Thats what i did. Now i'm screwed at trying to learn my field why trying to do the job. I think i'l have another beer.
So our tax dollars paid for the program's development, which is now going to enrich Brent? Why isn't this program released to public domain or GPL?
I'm with you. But I say go further. In high school, it's the same thing. Why not automate the grading there as well? Hell, while you're at it, go down to the primary school level. I mean, the kids are all just writing about the same crap - their dogs, the family vacation, their favorite color. God, it's such a trial to actually go through this repetitive crap over and over again.
It makes differentiating people into the appropriate category so much easier when you can use a program that removes the human component. In time, we could easily replace teachers with software, which would save the teachers from the endless monotony of teaching, and would allow them to obtain more interesting jobs. Students would benefit from a more uniform curriculum, denuded of human nuance and pesky creativity.
This prof is the prophet of things to come. He's the savior of our flawed education system!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This begs the question, why are we mis-spending college educations on young people who clearly aren't ready for it? I intend to pay for the college tuitions of my two nieces, but not until they are 21 or 22. After a term in the military or a few years of menial jobs, people have a much greater appreciation of higher education.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Hypothetically, lets just say this program can analyze structure, grammar, an all other objective facets of writing perfectally.
I know it says "discern content", but, I highly doubt it can truly "understand" what my paper is trying to convey.
So, if I write a well-planned, detailed, and highly organized paper on the complex social interactions between aphids, platypi, and manic androids, I can still achieve a good grade?
Until the computer can actually understand the content, it can't provide a well-supported grade for the paper.
...and pay no attention to the graduate student hunched over his laptop computer
I later found out why from someone who had been taught by him before. He would take 100% - the percentage of passive sentences found by the Word program. So I intstantly started handing in garbage essays with 0% passive sentences.
Saw this article and immediately thought of the solution here?
Is it possible that Professor Bent may be advertising this as some sort of sociological experiment?
What if he grant application was reviewed by a program instead of a real person? I wonder how he would like it
Actually that's already been done. Quite effectivly too.
Gotta love it. Students doing poorly in your class? Getting complaints about how "hard" a prof you are? President complaining that your high requirements are bringing down grades and making the school look bad in the college choice publications?
Solution: Asign a grade spread between A- and C+. Maybe if you are paying attention, give that REALLY good one an A+. But since you are really just worried about keeping your job, apply a statistical curve and randomize the grade/name combinations. Works great! Hey man, remember "D"s and "F"s are mean, and reduce your satisfaction rating on student evaluations.
Personaly I'd rather go to a school with low reported average GPA, it MIGHT mean the place is full of loosers, or it might just mean the profs are still in charge of education, instead of the administration (gotta keep the paying party customers, I mean students happy)
Standards are low, and with College becoming the "new high-school" they'll only get lower. Hell, Gerorge W. Bush got (bought?) a degree from Yale.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
Well, sure this will work for sociology, but what about for a real subject?
Can someone please explain to me why college is important again?
We need a mind factory that can replicate humanoids, while eliminating the efficieny errors in industrial production that are brought about by 'thinking' drones.
The QualrUS (Quotas for Uniform Advanced Lobotomies in Retarded Americans) program is furthering the replication of cheap 'middle-class' drones, thereby ensuring future American workforce quotas.
Do not worry about the term "Sociology", as that is just a proxy term used to filter the right applicants into the pizza delivery production unit classification.
"And where the hell's my fold-up flying car.."
The company folded.
I can't belive no one has pointed this out yet. He uses this to ensure that the students are using the terminology from the class in reasonable sentence format. It allows them to write a draft, get an automatic scoring within minutes and then start the next draft. Without this a typical student has to wait for the next class to turn the paper in and another couple of days to get the reviewed paper back. This lets them do many revisions without the long waiting for the professor. He still reads the final version to see if it is an uter piece of crap or not. He is just cutting out the TA going through all the early drafts.
chown -R us
How long before he's replaced entirely by his own program to cut down on staff costs?"
He should patent the method AND copyright the idea so he can keep Universities from doing precisely that.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I would think that the students who recieved the computer-generated grades, unless they agreed in advance to be bound by them, would have a pretty good case for a complaint against the profesor in question.
Unless the professor is prepared to put his grading machine to a blind peer-review test (which methinks it would fail dismally), then it shouldn't be accepted as a satisfactory way to grade.
Not to mention the extreme disrespect the professor is showing to his students' time and abilities.
If this program can really grade papers, that is analyze them for content, structure and logic, then it should be ale to pass the Turing Test. If it's really doing what the professor says then it should be able to deliver a report saying "Yes, your argument is good, but the logic is weak on such-and-such a point."
If it can do this, I say it can pass the Turing Test, and if it can't, then it's not grading papers accurately.
No big deal. For courses with many students probably the only way to manage the teaching load wihout having to spend all of your time reading these papers (remember: college professors are paid for teaching AND research).
... yet, the test normally only tells you if the result is correct, not if its programmed well.
...
Programming assignments for computer science students are also tested automatically
I consider this as an exclusion process: It is not guaranteed that every paper that passes based on this program is good. But if it doesn't pass, chances are very high that it's crap
So since the professor's time is worth about $36.00/hour and he spends 200 less hours on reading papers...
200 hours * $32.00 = $7200
He teaches about 84 students...
$7200 / 84 = $85.71 refund for each student. It's party time!
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
...then a student should be able to write a program that develops an essay. That way the student isn't cheating too, because they will have created the essay, indirectly.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Can it be adapted to check posts on Slashdot ?
I mean, if it can deal with dupes, grammer, and trolls it would be very useful !
Okay Slashdot Editors, time to fork out the $$$ to get some auto-moderating going on in these threads! Wait, can this grading program test for humor? No? Fuck it then.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I don't have a problem with it... Means I could justify requesting my essay to be manually re-marked every single time his computer program spat out a grade I wasn't happy with.
That's interesting, because I found the same thing - but not through college. I got much better at writing because I wrote articles on Kuro5hin and submitted them for peer review for voting. I got feedback and my writing style got better and better because of the feedback.
From here, I got even more detailed feedback when I started writing articles for Wikipedia (for instance, see Exploding whale) and when I submitted them to featured article candidates and peer review.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
too bad it isn't open source.
it is also 200 bucks for the student version
and it only runs on windows
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
If this professor's analysis can be "simulated" by a computer program, then he was obviously not doing a thorough enough analysis to begin with. I know plenty of professors that would laugh at the idea that a computer program would be able to "calculate" emotion, nuance, subtle sarcasm, humor, insightfulness, etc...
This professor should be fired.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I find it sort of strange that when Computer Science profs use computers to test projects it is seen as legitimate, but when a computer can do it for sociology papers it is seen as a slam against the discipline. If in fact computers can do a decent job at this sort of thing, then getting a good grade in the social sciences/humanities might be less arbitrary/subjective than popular opinion would have us believe. Of course just like it's hard for a program to check if code is "innovative" or "clever", we will probably need humans to decide whether a student looked at an issue in a particularly insightful way.
I dunno if they want my essay to be graded by this program. It might crash from too many syntax errors.
unable to resolve function slashdot.sig(), aborting...
Does it take into consideration ass kissing and brown nosing?
It seems to me that this is less indicative of the progress of technology than of the decadence of thought. The difficulty of writing a genuinely correct grammar -- much less a grammar checker -- taints any such product technically. The general theory that "grammar doesn't matter" is only a response to the incorrect grammars invented by pedants.
But content is worse. Anyone who has read college essays knows that most are hackneyed and even foolish -- it's not much better than reading Slashdot with a low threshhold. Whatever may be popular, there are right and wrong ideas; in literary analysis, for instance, one might rightly posit that "we can draw a conclusion" from a text, but it takes a much better argument to establish genuine authorial intent. But while this software might track the structure of trivial arguments, and though it might compare it to certain standards and external content, I cannot believe that it holds a high standard. Likely it punishes advanced thought and structure.
Unless I see otherwise, I shall hold that its use should keep students away, for they know by it that standards are low and that they're dumping their money away. But then, that's true of most schools.
From the OP: "How long before he's replaced entirely by his own program to cut down on staff costs?" You know, somebody has to teach the material in the first place. I sure as heck get more out of lecture than I do out of reading the textbook (well, in most classes)... The only one really in danger is the grad student getting paid solely to grade papers. And then you've got the point about how the final papers are still read by the professor, anyway. I'm reminded of a middle school teacher I had, around 1998, who talked about how people used to proclaim that teachers would be replaced by computers by the year 2000. It's the same question, the deadlines just keep being pushed back. So, to make a long story short, I doubt teachers will ever be fully replaced by computers.
"But Professor, my original essay was really good! I just had to add a bunch of crap to get past the lameness filter ..."
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
If Google can be gamed, I shudder to think what kind of crap you could feed the profs program.
LOL. Tenure.
-- $G
"How long before he's replaced entirely by his own program to cut down on staff costs?"
I would say a long time. A program that tries to understand natural language requires some sort of "intelligence," a quality that humans definetly possess and computers, up to now, definetly do not.
AI still mostly consists of certain hacks to trick other people into thinking the programs are intelligent - basically attempting to fool the Turing Test. This can often produce great results and can be very useful, but almost never replaces a human in complex tasks (such as natural language processing).
The difficulty arises because humans cannot easily (or perhaps possibly) comprehend their own intelligence. It seems so natural to read a sentence and make sense of it, but when it comes time to program a computer to do it, most people try to emulate the behavior of their own comprehension. This may trick some people, but the simple nature of the programs cannot possibly be as powerful as an actual human.
The best solution, in my opinion, is a closer study of neuroscience and how it can be applied to silicon (or how new technologies need to arise to emulate the complex neural structure of the brain).
I know that people are starting to use computers to grade standardized essays, but there (currently) must always be a human checking the results because of the small number of unforseen cases that the hacked algorithms cannot do a good job. After all, the programs do not "understand" anything that is written. That is why I postulate it will be a long, long time before computers can truly emulate humans.
If a professor does not care enough to read my papers, then to hell with him. There is more that a professor does than just check grammer, or look for passages that deals with the question and used terms from the book. The best professors I had were the ones who wrote all over the margins, sharing their thoughts about my ideas. Those are the ones who I would meet in their office to chat with. They are the ones who I went to for advice.
I had one teacher in english who graded the first paper, reading them all. She then never read another paper, only skimmed them. She pretty much gave out the same grade on all your papers you got on your first paper. I got an "A" on my paper, and another student got a "D". So I was working with the "D" student, and no matter what was done, the "D" grades went up to "C-" but stuck. So for the last paper, we switched our papers. Guess what? My paper was still an "A" even though it belonged to the other student, and the other paper was a "C". We went to the teacher to explain what we did, and rather than the professor owning up to what was done, we the students got blamed.
This really pisses me off. Professors get paid over $70,000 a year, some over $100,000 a year, they work 20 hours a week, and they have job security and a union. Then they want to slack off. Fucking asshats. Something like this makes me want to vote to remove public funding from schools, to always vote no whenever there is a refferendum to increase property tax. With those kinds of professors, people might as well get their education at the public library.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
"How long before he's replaced entirely by his own program to cut down on staff costs?" ????
Most professors are not there to teach. Even for those who specialize in fields that their employing school is far from being a leader. Of course, there are subjects in some schools where professors do nothing but teach, but in any scientific field, even the "social sciences", professors are hired to work on other projects. They don't just go from class to class teaching and grading papers and tests in between the classes. One of the few things I learned from the way too many years of being in school.
I can say this much, I have never had any other professor, outside of the Chem or Physics department, grade my papers like a math professor. Most of the humanities professors just skim over. But in my Calculus class, it was possible to turn in homework and get negative points. For example, you have a problem 1.0 + 1.00 = ?. You write 2. First, half a point off for not figuring in significant digits. Another half a point off for sloppy handwriting. And the full point off for not showing your work. Problem worth one point, your score is negative one point. In some cases, it was better to not turn in anything at all.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
How long before he's replaced entirely by his own program to cut down on staff costs?
Moreover how long before students invent programs to write papers this program will give perfect grades to?
I wonder how a sociology professor could write a program that follows logic. Can it tell when a slippery slope argument is? I can see it looking for- If a. If b. Then c. But how does it know what a, b or c means?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
So now we're going to pat some guy on the back for finding a way to cut corners instead of doing the job he was paid to do. Sure, I sympathize for having to read so many papers. But, during one semeseter in college, I was responsible for learning to program in LISP, learning at least the basics for writing assembly code, reading Martin Luther (and searching for humanist thought as residue from the Renaissance and a precursor for the Enlightenment) and reading the Tale of Genji (first novel ever... which makes Don Quixote look like a small pamphlet). Did we as students complain? Of course we did! We railed against the professors for "not understanding how much work we had to do"... but did we cut corners? Some did... and I watched a handful get kicked out for cheating and several just failed their classes.
The difference? We were paying for that "abuse". Here's a guy getting paid to do it, and now getting credit for cutting corners... and denying several students the attention they deserve for the work they did.
If we demand the students to do their own work. We should demand the faculty do their own as well!
Good Will Hunting?
So more power to him. He is unlikely to be getting anything better or more insightful than a parroting of what he has already delivered in his monologues to his class. Same papers, year in and year out. No big deal to grade these kids with an automated program.
This reminds me of a teacher I had who had over heads with references to pages in the text, 2nd edition. Problem was we were up to the 7th edition, so I can only guess how old the over heads were, and how lazy the professor was to update them.
If a teacher does not have a passion to teach, they should be doing something else.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
That reminds me of a startegy some people had when I was an undergrad. Since they knew teachers only skimmed the writings, they used a shotgun approach. They threw everything in the essay including the kitchen sink. They figure somewhere in there, the terms the professor was skimming for would be included. Sadly, these were the "A" students. The "B" students, who tried to write a real paper and make a point, did not get any worthwhile feedback.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Finally the profs don't have to waste their time with that pesky work!
This reminds me of managers who feel annoyed, maybe even unfairly put upon, when their employees are taking up their valuable time asking them to make decisions or for guidance.
Isn't it the professor's _job_ to read the essays he makes his students write?
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
The problems were set up so that you really couldn't get the right answer without understanding the material; online, you had to enter 3 or 4 significant figures and the right units to get credit.
I'm not sure how a computer would make a student "show work" in Calculus, but there are a lot of symbolic mathematical languages out there. In fact, thereom-verifiers have been around for a long time; if the student just has to mention axioms, simple table-lookup is all that's needed. Of course, at some point a mathematician needs to start writing simple, symmetric, beautiful proofs, but 90% of the kids in a freshman calc class won't ever really do serious math...
And for all those people blathering on about the outrage of computer marking and instead academics should be rewarding original content, this is sociology 101 we're talking about. At that level, all you're hoping for is that students can write a semi-coherent essay, and, frankly, most of them can't.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It seems to me that an issue of more concern would not be cheating, but recognizing creative styles of writing. If students are trained to write papers that score high using this algorithm, what would happen to all of the students who don't conform to standard structures? Will all essays begin to look similar in writing style and structure?
We raise our slide-rules high.
When a Freshman at Mizzou asked an Upper Classman which professor to choose for Sociology, the befuddled Freshman was left with the reply:
"Get Bent"
Having a program to grade your papers is nothing new... I remember being in junior high, using Word for Windows which could give your paper a couple of "grade level" marks. Word obviously didn't grade it based on content, but on style- which is somewhat subjective. After a while I figured out what style Word wanted my papers to conform to, and wrote to that. This didn't influence my content at all, but it did help me use different sentence structures and better grammar. I don't know... using something like that for grading the technical elements of language is one thing that I don't mind too much, but grading content that way is something different. I'm a fourth year Comp Engg. student taking a compilers course this semester, and all of our assignment testing is done with scripts (they aren't provided before the assingments are due). Even with a well thought out set of tests, one misplaced byte can often cost between 10-40% on your total mark, and a minor misinterpretation of a contradicting spec could easily cost the same. This test policy has caused a lot of people with valid assignments to get vary poor grades on the labs. While the grading program at issue here probably has more brains behind it, I can't help but think that nuances in an individuals writing style could cause completely valid papers to get marked poorly as well.
You remember peer editing in 4th grade? Did that have any value? Not really - but if you got instant feedback on papers, that makes it easier to just write better in the first place.
Especially if this technology is combined with this technology.
paintball
Ours were always graded by computer. If you got the correct output for the given input, you got an A.
paintball
1. Students write a draft of their essay, which they then upload via a Web form to this program
2. The program gives them a score on various parts of their essay, giving them valuable feedback on what needs to be improved.
This just in! University English professor discovers the POSIX toolchain. Novel misuse of cat, awk, and sed and friends expected. Film at 11!
I have lots of programs that save me hours of "doing my fucking job". They're called scripts, and it's called efficiency.
If I can write a program to automate a menial task so I don't have to do it, then by all means, I should do it. If grading undergrad papers is a menial task that can be automated, then it should be automated.
I mean, just because a freshman writes a bad paper doesn't mean a professor has to actually read it.
paintball
It might be able to guage sentence flow and scan for keywords and patterns, but there's no way it can understand content. Frankly, the content is the most important part of the essay.
I'm skeptical.
a professor of sociology wrote in his spare time what thousands of researchers at the likes of IBM, MS, etc couldn't do.
if it's that good, it can probably help some of those excite/babel translation output crap too.
Unless it's an English class, they're just looking to see if you've learned the material for that course. Especially for the essay questions in the midterm and final, they will always just skim the papers for key words, phrases, and dates. They underline them and add up the points. That's just the way it works. The "B" student, who writes something interesting, but doesn't cover all of the relevant material, loses points.
For a term paper, you additionally have to use correct grammer and spelling. Also, do not try to argue something stupid. Don't take a contrary opinion to the professor or to popular opinion on the college campus. You won't be able to convince the grader, and they'll think that if your argument isn't convincing, then it must be flawed and you deserve a bad or mediocre grade.
These are things that I wish someone had told me when I was an undergrad.
My other first post is car post.
How can someone who spent so many years receiving a "higher education" turn out so void of common sense?
What a shame. Glad I never had a lazy asshole instructor like that in college.
Announce to the class that they have two options. If they want their paper to be computer-graded, the maximum they can get on the paper is a B. Only hand-graded papers can earn an A - but they will be judged on original thought, well-chosen sources, and total structure. If they don't meet those criteria, they will be penalized (and as such, would score lower than the computer would give). That way, students who aren't confident in their capability for truly excellent writing and novel thought can choose the computer grader for a safe B, while the truly thoughtful and creative students can be justly rewarded.
Wait - what the fuck am I saying? ALL college students should be graded by the non-computer criteria I just listed, and those who can't do (or at least attempt) that kind of work shouldn't be in college.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Something about this article makes me wonder ...
Believing as much as I can into progress & technology, I imagine
text processing engines can be developed into sophisticated
systems having some AI properties. We've had a pretty sharp course
about it in our CE/CS university.
However, I graduated a mere six-seven years ago, still following what's up and cool, and this is the first time I encountered a story like that!
There is some credibility to the whole issue in the sense
that Qualrus is an aid of some sort (terminology-checker), and that final grading is done by the "human" professor anyway.
The claim of "instant feedback", results in seconds etc. may very well be in contradiction with the claim that any serious and complex machine-learning, pattern analysis or artificial intelligence tools are in use here.
If this article is true, the described introductory course in writing sociology-babble probably isn't worth much (or at least shouldn't be). Personally, I'm more inclined to the option that this story will either prove to be a hoax (at least my intuitive word-pattern processor is blinking red bXXXXXit-bXXXXXit lights to some funny details in the story) in the near future or at least, a few misunderstandings will about what a computer program developed by a sociology professor really can or should do to students papers will be cleared.
How long before he's replaced entirely by his own program to cut down on staff costs?
Technophobia? In Slashdot, of all places?
Any suffuciently sophisticated paper is indistinguishable from gibberish.
~C*PYour CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
April fools day was a week ago.
How long before people doing x get replaced by very small shell scripts, where x is "writing code", "system administration", or "asking stupid rhetorical questions"?
From his Intro to Sociology Course Outline:
"There will be one paper based on a combination of Internet and library resources that must be written using a word processor worth 50 points."
If this is any indicator of his understanding of grammatical rules, I pity his students.
Question: How many points is your word processor worth?
If you read the article, it clearly states that the program is used to analyse drafts, thus giving the students a chance to improve it before submitting the final version which the professor reads himself.
As for the field of Sociology, it really says nothing of importance, but perhaps it says something about writing an argumentative text?
it was developed after a $100 000 grant, so the important question is if it under a free license, like the GNU GPL?
I know a lot of the comments are along the lines of "oh, well your professors barely read your papers anyway." At my school and many others, that's not the case. I have a conference with my professor about each major paper I turn in, usually lasting 20-30 minutes each. In addition to this, each paper I get back comes with at least a full page of comments and questions, as well as margin notes. Over the years, this has helped me improve my writing by an incalculable factor.
I'm paying over $30k a year for tuition at a small (some would say "elite") liberal arts college and I'd leave in a heartbeat if my school ever started using any kind of software like this.
autograding is very different in different subjects.
for cs projects, autograders only work if the everyone's project is suppose to return the same output given the same input. when outputs differ, they give skeletons for the project and predefined functions which you fill in and they can test those functions by themselves. when you write a program from scratch and have no defined return value, it's practically impossible to write an autograder for it besides the fact that it compiles and runs.
there was a math example mentioned about saying how people's math homework/tests got autograded. math problems like cs functions usually only 1 correct answer. programs can check for that and obviously be able to check for errors within the work/function to see what might be causing it.
but writing an essay doesn't have 1 correct answer (unless the topic/theme was very specific). often times in my philosophy class or psychology class, the topic is very open and we have a wide range of topics to choose from. i'm not sure how the essays were in this sociology class, but i wouldn't expect it to be much different.
if the topic of the essay was really confined or if these were short answers or fill-in-the-blanks, i'd totally agree with autograders.
but writing an essay to me is like creating a computer program from scratch or creating a new math theorem. it's not just something an autograder can give a grade for. of course it's a good tool to give an initial score such as grammar, spelling, etc. (for cs programs, it'll compile and run / for math theorems, the proof flows / etc), but at the end, a person is still required to verify. if not, bad papers might end up getting good grades and those won't complain. good papers might end up getting bad grades, and these people will definitely complain and what you end up is a class with a higher than average curve.
HD Trailers
That's the first thing that came to mind as I was reading the summary: well, gee, so he can now grade purely on form, rather than content.
Sure, the program can analyze that the sentence flow and structure looks like it's analyzing/arguing/explaining/whatever a point. But is it even arguing the right point? Does that paper even _have_ a point at all, or is it just a babbledygook of random nouns/verbs/adjectives/etc that fits a structure?
I'm not even sure it has to end up "beautifully expressed babble", it can just be any collection of random words that fits the structure the program is looking for. I.e., I'm sure it can be _awful_ babble and still pass.
And indeed, a student then doesn't even have to understand how the program works or anything. A script will do just fine. Just download a paper that got good grades (hence, fits the idiot's program) and run it through a script that replaces each word with a random word that's in the same category. (Transient/intransient verb, noun, etc.)
E.g., take the following two sentences:
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced its prestigious Pioneer Awards today, and one of the three lucky winners for 2005 is Mitch Kapor."
"A Pink Smell Stew impaled its dormant Turkey Shaddow tomorrow, or five of the two spotted continuums towards 2005 equals Mitch Kapor."
It's just the random word substition I was talking about. It isn't even beautifully phrased babble, it's just awful even by dadaist criteria. Yet it has the exact same sentence flow and structure. Can the program even tell that the second is random blabber?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I wonder how long until it'll be "0/100: Syntax error on line 37"
Dunno about you, but I'd expect someone's sociology grades to actually reflect some understanding of sociology. Same as I'd expect that their math grades reflect having learned some maths, or that the grades they get in their Java course reflect _some_ knowledge of Java.
Having sociology grades that reflect purely English grammar skills, is as sick a joke as grading someone's data structures course based purely on indentation. It misses the whole point and makes a mockery of the whole teaching process.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"The grade is based (in theory) on how well you meet the goals."
Except it turns the whole goal on its head. Instead of the goal being to bloody learn something, the goal becomes to just have a bogus text that can pass a (probably piss-poor) grammar checker and a dumb keyword scan.
All of a sudden cheating got easier: you don't even need to copy someone else's paper, and be caught by googling. You can just write any idiocy that's got the right sentence structure, and replace random words with keywords and names from a list someone else gave/sold you.
"It's closer to "if I have to read a poor explanation of a basic tenet of my field one more time, I'm going to kill someone...""
But guess what? That's his job.
So you're telling me that he's too bored to do his job. Fine. Then he can bloody look for another job.
Noone asks me if in _my_ job I'm too bored to read yet another program specification. I mean "oh, god, if I have to read another poor exercise in just asking for a PHBs favourite colours and fonts, I'm going to kill someone." Or "oh god, if I have to read another piss-poor piece of some unskilled monkey's code to find a bug, I'm gonna kill someone." Guess what? I'm paid to do that anyway. Noone will accept "oh, I coded a flight sim instead of an e-commerce site, because I couldn't be arsed to read yet another spec."
That's all I'm asking from him too: to do his job.
"I may be going out on a limb here, but I am willing to say there is virtually nothing interesting about papers written in introductory courses of any kind to anyone that is an expert in the field. They may be interesting to you, because you didn't previously know the information."
I may be going out on a limb here, but that's precisely why the course is there: because you didn't previously know that. Otherwise you could skip directly to the third year.
And his job isn't to learn new stuff from your paper, it's to make sure you understood those basics. Because otherwise going any further is building a house without a foundation. That paper isn't supposed to enlighten him, it's not supposed to entertain him, it's just supposed to prove to him that you've understood what he taught.
And part of his _job_, boring as it may be, is precisely to read all that back and see if you've actually understood that.
And again, that's all I'm asking of him: to do his bloody job. Or find another job, if the current one is too boring for his highness.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, except for the part about the dormant turkey shaddow.
Most impaled turkey shaddows that I've seen are anything but dormant (especially if they were impaled by their pink smell stew).
OTOH, planking lists of generous seaweed enshrined the mixed Enterprise-C on parts of carpeted songbirds.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Indeed, it got an F[lamebait]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First, moving around quickly, and with purpose, is a true sign of character. Secondarily, bustle(e.g. hustle) yields more product for the working types. "Hustle and bustle are like my right and left arms," said Li'l Spicy in his famous "Hustle and Bustle Are Like My Right and Left Arms" speech. Webster's defines bustle as "excited and often noisy activity; a stir." A stir, indeed. Finally, sometimes gross stuff can be funny.
Here are some links:
- Turn It In
- Penny Arcade
It is now my intention to play video games for several hours.Sources:
The Brothers Chaps (2004).Homestar Runner. Retrieved April 8, 2005 from www.homestarrunner.com
Random Source (2005). that you won't read because you were too lazy. Retrieved April 8, 2005 from www.toreadthisfar.com
(I have four words for this post: "Too much half-asleep effort")
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
The point is there are other ways to save the time spent marking.
The problem with automated marking is that there are so many solutions to the one problem. I was quite surprised at the different ways students would attack each problem - especially so for maths assignments, which I thought would be more standardised. I first started marking by trying to make sure every proof was completely flawless. That strategy was soon revised to "If I can't find a flaw in 3 minutes, you get full marks."
Yet another blogger begging for an audience.
Nah, you write as many sigfigs (significant figures) as is found in the least accurate information. Otherwise by the same logic 10 + 9 = 20. Like your logic though :)
I have a teacher this semester who doesn't teach sigfigs but expects you to get it right. Then he applies rules like "but with this info, you always show 3 sigfigs, with this info, 2 unless blah blah blah blah blah"... and he says this after marking everyone down in the test, mind you. Good thing I had a High School teacher who taught me this stuff.
His excuse? "You should have asked more questions in class". I swear, he must have expected us to actually ask "how do sigfigs work?" without knowing it would be an issue. Doesn't help that he makes you feel stupid when you ask a question in class.
He's not all bad, but still pretty bad. For more information: click.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
If it could also detect dupes on slashdot, it would be really useful.
The real question is: if it saves him 200 hours of reading a semester, is he using that 200 hours to provide more/better services to his students?
Is he looking closer at portions of the papers the software identifies? Is he using the output to generate more detailed/customized feedback that will help the student?
Or, is he just improving his handicap?
MadCow
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
When are the A.I. types in this world going to
get real and realize that a computer is, in no
way, A MIND. It's the same kind of naivety that
led guys like Minsky to declare that computers
would use humans as house pets two decades after
1975.
Geeky adolescence still lives. Sheesh.
In other news, Bent Technologies has released Sociology Essay Writer, that is compatible with popular automatic essay assessment software.
But can we teach it to spot dupes and use it on slashdot? (and does it have a "Rolland" filter?)
I would like to know what school you are at where professors get paid $70-100k a year and work 20 hours a week and still get to slack off. I'd like to send my resume there.
has gone right into the shitter, at least at the University of Missouri. This program was actually approved for school wide use? What the hell is wrong with the University of Missouri? I find the whole thing just reprehensible. I guess at least Ed Brent has finally defined exactly the qualities of a "good paper".
I'd be interested to put the Gettysburg address, MLKs "I Have A Dream" speech, major works of literature, etc through Mr. Brents meat grinder and see what grade they get. The whole thing reminds me of that scene in Dead Poets Society where they try to measure the "greatness" of a poem using trumped up terms like "importance" and "perfection". Sprinkle in a little computer wizardry, and suddenly you've got a mysterious, unbending, rule machine.
Frankly this kind of thing just disgusts me. I'm no romantic, but you can't analyse how good a paper is based on some algorithm. It's like the idiots who try to analyse a songs potential through computer analysis.
AccountKiller
That must be a pretty smart human!
arguably a better learning technique from a usability standpoint
... but only for a content-free "discipline" like sociology or other pseudo-sciences.
Yes, it might well be a better learning technique from a usability standpoint
Cargo cults a la Feynman are all about form, and this tool can indeed detect the presence of form and even distinguish form that is considered "good" by some metric from form that is considered "bad".
But unless it actually understands what is being written through deep semantic analysis performed against a thorough database of relation-interlinked concepts, then there is no way the tool can detect hard scientific content (to the small extent that it occurs in sociology) from gibberish that just obeys the right forms.
As Brent himself says, "In sociology, we want them to learn the terms." And that pretty much sums it up.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
That a computer program can do just as well as him says a lot about the care and diligence he put into marking papers by hand. Sack him now - tenure be damned.
And no - I didn't read the article.
I'm no clustering guru, but I tried OpenMosix and wasnt impressed with the performance at all. While I havent yet tried OpenSSI, I see time and time again that it is far superior to OpenMosix and accomplishes the same objective (SMP emulation over network).
If you're into clustering, consider trying openssi.
Since this was done with an NSF grant, doesn't the source have to be available? I wasn't aware that the NSF was in the business of sponsoring corporate development.
Now how about a program thate makes writing essays easier? Try this one: http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
I remember sociology -- easy, full of jargon and pseudo-science and essentially based on common sense with a liberal bias. Here's a course listing from the M.U. web site: "Survey of approaches to the study of behaviors commonly regarded as deviant such as crime, sexual abuse, substance abuse, mental illness, etc." Huh? Crime may be OK in Mr. Brent's department? In his world?
As a history teacher myself, my first thought was why on earth would any teacher want to abandon their students' writings to to a computer program? There is no possible way a programmer would have near enough time to fill that software with all the nuance of the written word. And far worse, what does the program do when it encounters an original thought? If someone approaches the problem with a solution unexpected by the program would it get a poor grade simply based on not being what the professor is looking for? I see answers that are different from what I expected on tests and it is refreshing and exciting to see students formulate their own ideas. That's the whole point! How can you possibly program something to react to what it is not expecting to see? Aside from the whole program grading pitfalls, what kind of teacher could possibly want to willingly take their fingers off the pulse of their students? Essay writing is one of the strongest academic bonds between teacher and student and to relegate that to computer work shows a desire to divorce oneself from the student. What meaningful comments and feedback can a teacher really give about a paper they have never read?? All in the name of saving 200 hours of reading... Ahhh yes... he has to publish! Publish 1st, students 47th.
I'm very cynical about AI research building a conscious and autonomous gestalt any time soon (and a little dubious that this program even "detects" argument very well in real-world language), but, in this case, I'm willing to believe that the program just might work well enough to be a useful complement to the professor's reading. As long as it is scanning for writing style, terminology and, perhaps, some argument structure.
In the '80s I looked at the shareware DOS release of a program called Readability Plus by Roland Larson. Apparently it is still around:
http://www.stylewriter-usa.com/readability.html
in Windows and Mac programs.
The guy's original business model was a little creepy. Sell it to corporations so everyone would speak in the same corporate-approved voice. But it was a pretty interesting program to play around with. Put in a couple paragraphs of Philip K. Dick and it would demonstrate in charts and graphs why it was practically perfect pulp novel writing. (Alan Dean Foster was about a grade level above optimal if I remember.)
...approve Alan Sokal's infamous 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' ?
Circumcision is child abuse.
That has been around forever, numerous essay grading approaches have been developed and programs written.
Let's just put the students in a room, give them an assignment and use the output from the professor's program as input for a Sony-patented device sitting on the students head in realtime.
This could simulate the feeling good writers have when they know the passage they are writing will need to be rewritten, give them a nice feeling about a well-written sentence etc.
Soon they'll try to avoid the bad feelings and try to reflect this in their writing. The same patterns the professor's program uses will show up in the brain of the student.
I think I should finish this comment up with a paranoid pop-culture reference, but I can't think of one that fits well enough (just imagine something).
You know what's next...
Scantron Essays!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
WTF is a word processor? I write documents in LaTeX ;-)
What, his program can't read a DVI?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
All the "but if it was an English class" posts make a nice alternate history what-if scenario, and all. No doubt there. Also an a very insightful observation on the role of English classes and essays.
But if you actually RTFA you'll see that we're talking about a _sociology_ professor and _sociology_ papers.
"If it's an English class, that's the whole point."
Well, precisely. That's the whole point: it's not an English class.
He's grading a _science_ class based on form instead of content. _That's_ the problem.
Unlike the English class in your example (which you are right about) his job _is_ to read and judge the content.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When I was in college in the late '80's, the "trick" to getting good grades really was to understand what the professors were looking for, and give it to them.
For example, I had a professor who distributed pre-printed pieces of paper that had a line drawn around it indicating the margin (something like two inches at the top, a half inch on the right and bottom, and three inches on the left. The large margins on the left and top were for the prof's notes and comments to us.) We had to type (with a typewriter) our papers to fit within the bounds of the margins, and spelling and grammar counted (and this was a Psychology class, not an English class.) He would not accept more than the one page. Another professor required papers be written in a specific topical order. If you deviated from those models, you got marked down.
The point was not that the profs were trying to be devious, but to make us take into account the instructions they gave us. If we followed the instructions, we got better grades. If we didn't, we would get marked down. And yes, content did count too.
Yes, it was a hassle, but the result is that now, when my bossed give me instructions, I follow them. The times when I deviate are the times when I really hear about it. Lesson learned!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
CollegeBoard is rolling in dough. And what do they do with this money? Develop things like e-raters so they don't have to pay for graders.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina.
It does that too, actually. I checked the program webbsite and found out it can check for some sorts of parroting.
We have a system like that in school too. We have to e-mail some reports to a special mail address which checks for parroting and the like.
Okay, slashdot readers:
The first one to guess what country the parent is from gets a cookie!
of the teacher who decided to record his lecture and just play the tape for the students while he got some other stuff done.
he left the room with the tape running, returned an hour or two later to discover a room devoid of students, but full of small tape recorders that the students had left running on their desks to transcribe the lecture.
my father told me this, so I'm not sure if it was true or 'urban legend' but cautionary nonetheless, no?
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
If the profs at your school mark grades down because they have a different opinion you should change schools. No offense.
I had a professor that said he would give his opinion but he would grade based on how well the argument was crafted and backed up by facts/references.
ANother professor complained that too many papers where just repeating what he had said in class and he had marked those down for not having enough original thought.
Grammar and spellling are alway important..
"I have lots of programs that save me hours of "doing my fucking job". They're called scripts, and it's called efficiency."
But you're obviously a sysadmin or similar - your job is to use a deterministic tool to solve a single problem. A professor is a teacher - his job is to train an unherently unreliable chaotic entity to do something they have no prior experience of doing.
All you have to do is give the right instructions and the computer will be the perfect pupil (or nearly so) - it's essentially deterministic.
A professor has to give perfect instructions, then pick up the pieces and correct the student when they get it wrong because they forgot/misunderstood/didn't listen/weren't at a lecture/etc. Without that essential explanation how are the students supposed to learn?
"If I can write a program to automate a menial task so I don't have to do it, then by all means, I should do it. If grading undergrad papers is a menial task that can be automated, then it should be automated."
But, but, but, grading isn't a menial task - it should be the single most important thing in a professor's job desciption. Honestly, name me one thing more important that a professor does than training the next generation of people in his/her field. There is nothing more important, because if they didn't do this the entire field would die with them.
Professor should not be hired to churn out research papers or novels, or to go to symposia or meetings, or to sit in their offices and contemplate their navels all day - they should be employed to teach fucking students. Anything else is a pleasant distraction from their essential role in society.
Apologies if this position seems a little aggressive, but I went to a university where CompSci professors were chosen based on their ability to churn out papers and make the department look good, and it was a fucking disgrace. Lecturers who couldn't speak english, lecturers who were using six-year-old out-of-date teaching materials because they couldn't be bothered to write new ones, and worst of all, professors who treated their students as nothing more than an annoying distraction from their pet projects.
"I mean, just because a freshman writes a bad paper doesn't mean a professor has to actually read it."
Right, and just because your compiler throws errors doesn't mean you have to fix them, but don't expect your program to work for shit unless you complete the feedback loop and correct your program.
You know, the more I think of it, the more I suspect I might have just been trolled. If not, hope this gives food for thought. If so, well done sir - I haven't been successfully trolled for years.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
I don't think any professor should be allowed to use a program of this type. I'm not shelling out all of this cash so that a computer can grade my papers. I want the professors to read, and comment on, what I'm writing. That's a part of learning. Listening, reading, researching, discussing, writing and having what you've written graded by a human being who can understand and comment intelligently on what you've written. If you don't get feedback from your professor, what's the point of going to a university? Just send me video tapes of the lectures, I'll send in my papers and tests to be graded electronically. Oh and since the university is no longer paying a boat load of professors to teach and grade or paying to maintain the school grounds, tuition should be reduce by 50% to 75%.
"In sociology, we want them to learn the terms," Brent said.
And that my friends, is why I (and I suspect many /. readers) hated most of the classes from K-College. The courses that taught me the most were the ones that taught me to think -not memorize buzzwords. The root problem is, many teachers are not interested in teaching; rather, they're focused on indoctrinating. They don't want you to learn how to think, they want you to think what they think.
I have found some courses (K-career) where I needed to "learn" large quantities of terms, exact formulas, and other minutia about a subject. While I can assimilate all of the data, the underlying "why" is often ommitted. Attempting to learn the "why" is usually met with red-herrings, quick subject changes, or the simple "don't worry about that" brush off. The truth is, many of these teachers/instructors simply don't understand the "whys". They themselves have memorized large quantities of data, but have no clue what drives the topic at a fundamental level. If you have a motivated curiosity and attempt to drill-down with the person, they become very uneasy and defensive (especially in front of others) because you're moving the conversation into areas where they are weak.
I don't expect this will ever change, but I have found ways to use this to my advantage in dealing with people. If you can understand the fundamentals affecting a given situation, you may have the ability to control or shift the situation to your advantage. I have out-maneuvered people on subjects where they are, by far, a subject-matter expert. The problem for them (the advantage for me) was, they knew a lot about the subject, but they did't truly "get" the subject.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
I hear a lot of whining about him not doing his job reading the papers. According to the article, he reads all of the papers but after they have been graded by the machine. The goal here is that the machine can give a preliminary score, the students can improve on that, and then he can read the improved paper.
This is exactly why professors ARE LAZY.
They have perhaps the easiest, well paid, professional job on the planet, and they still find ways to weasel out of the responsibility.
If my professor did this, I would write every paper about the alienation caused by this asshole's stupid invention.
What's next? A machine to teach infants to talk? How about a machine that plays with puppies?
There are some things in life that don't need to be automated.
Funny. I had the opposite experience.
Possibly because I studied philosophy, where nothing is considered sacred and true.
Essay questions would be things like "Present and Evaluate Descartes arguements for the Existence of God". So - either you decide Descarte's arguments are pretty solid, or you think they are problematic, and accordingly your paper becomes either a defense of Descartes or a criticism.
But, of course, you ask the age old quesition: "Which way does the prof *want* us to argue? What does he believe himself?"
That question turned out to be irrelavent. I know this because after the dust settled, he gave us two "sample papers" - papers written by students in the class which had recieved A grades, one was pro-Descartes, the other, critical.
In fact, as I recall, the Prof took great pains to not tell us what he actually thought of the matter, so as not to bias us one way or the other.
I remember in some of my first year classes with him, this was the source of no end of consternation to my fellow students who just didn't get it - they would fuss endlessly about "But, should I criticize Plato or not? WHICH DOES TEH PROF WANT???"
Doesn't matter as long as your essau is well written and your arguments are half-decent. You're only an undergrad after all, the Prof is not expecting publishable work from you.
After the article on Hit Song Science, I have to wonder if they want to teach the kids to do that earlier, to tweak their work into what the consumer wants rather than something that's necessarily good.
At University some of our Unix coursework was once graded by computer. As you can imagine; it didn't go very well. If you forgot to put a full-stop in an error message, 5% off. If you didn't leave two newlines after the output, another 5% off. It became an exercise in making sure your output was word-perfect to the spec. And even then I only managed 85% :|
Fortunately, the coursework was worth hardly anything, and after the fuss kicked up about it, I believe the professor went back to hand-grading.
I know a lot of papers in lower-level courses are graded by the teacher's upper level students. Why should we replace them with a program?
This gives the upper level students good experience and provides a resume builder as well as an opportunity to get paid in some cases.
I would expect someone trying to "beat the program" to churn out much more readible essays. Of course, some hacker could figure out how to submit gibberish to beat the program, but that would take even more work.
From the article: >The program analyzes sentence and paragraph structure and can ascertain the flow of arguments and ideas. It gives each work a numeric score based on the weight instructors place on various elements of the assignment. No it doesn't. To do that, the software would have to be able to reason. Also from the article: >With up to 140 students enrolled in his writing-intensive, introductory sociology course, Brent estimates he's saved more than 200 hours of work per semester with Qualrus. The final papers, which he does read, are usually much better as a result of Qualrus, too. Bull. If all he reads are the final papers, how can he know they've improved? You signed up for this job, numbnuts. Do the work.
The description for this article asked how long it would be before the professor who invented the software to grade papers was replaced by his own software. This made me think of a comment a salty old history teacher in my highschool made one day. He told the class that all college professors do is tell you what books to read. I thought he was being silly when he made the comment, but when I got to college his comment came back to haunt me. Many big name professors are like that. They strut into a lecture hall, talk a bit, give you page numbers to read and leave. You give your tests and papers to a TA. Maybe many of these professors could be replaced. The university could buy reading lists from contractors and use the aforementioned professor's software. Hell, maybe even the universities could be replaced by something cheaper. Instead of building universities blogs could be put up instead. A student would pay his/her tuition which would allow him/her to login and view the reading list for the class. A link would be available for him/her to upload his/her papers which would be instantly grated. A forum would exist, perhaps with a paid moderator knowledgeable on the subject to be available for discussions.
Ah,damn. I just ran this post through my funny-check, and against my intentions, this post is not "teh funny".
In highschool my English marks from year to year were highly variable, approximately CCACA in 5 years. The best explanation I could think of was that my writing style is strange, and those teachers which like my strange style give good marks, and the others don't.
The computer is highly likely to suffer from this, except it'll be the same program every year (different criteria from the teacher, admittedly), so it might give me all 'A's, but it might just as well give me all 'C's.
A certain amount of strangeness is required for creativity. This is dangerous.
budumchhhhhhh.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
Art Schools Dietzilla
"I think John von Neumann once said --- "If you can tell me exactly what it is that a machine cannot do, then I will build a machine to do exactly that!"."
Ok, I'll bite. How about a machine that loves me? Or a machine that is jealous of my children? Or a machine that is envious of my neighbor's wealth?
No, machines can't do EVERYTHING.
WHy the heck isn't this open source.
500$ crap
NSF/gov/me paid for it once.
It should be open source.
From the article: Brent, who received a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop Qualrus
According to Brent's departmental web page he intends to apply for an NSF award- there is a big difference between applying and getting those awards- those are very hard to get. His personal webpage makes no mention of NSF funding, and an search on the NSF award search site shows no such award. It does appear that there was an old $99,900 NSF award to the company Idea Works where he is president (same address as his home address, BTW), but that award lists someone else as the principal investigator and yet someone else as the former principal investigator, and seems to be for a kind-of related project on coding data. I'm not sure what the story is, but it is clear to me that at least some of the facts are wrong.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
can a computer program created by the professor be used to find Quality if the professor can't define it himself?
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
All the so-called "soft" sciences belong in the same category as astrology and fortune cookie fortunes. Some percentage of the predictions made in sweeping statements and vague generalizations are bound to play out, just based on the law of averages. I took several of these classes as an undergrad, and it's all hokum.
And don't get me started on Economics... If this were a "science" all those talking heads would be richer than Bill Gates. Instead they're scraping up a living as an "expert" on Fox News. You might as well use a Ouija Board. It's cheaper and just as accurate. Ask two Professors of Economics about the current state of the economy and you'll get four or five opinions.
I'd like to see departments called: Humanities, Sciences, and Psuedo-sciences
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I haven't seen this subject brought up.
Does it bother anyone else that the professor took $100,000 from the NSF to write this program, and then gets to sell it back to the rest of us taxpayers at $3000 a pop?
Had he financed the software himself, by working on it in his spare time or by saving up money so he could leave school to work on it, then I'd feel he should be free to charge what the market would bear. But when the NSF funds research, we all should be beneficiaries of that research. If the results of the research are wrapped up in a proprietary product, only the seller benefits from the new knowledge generated by the grant. The buyer benefits from the existence of the technology, but can't use it to further advance the science embodied in the program.
The rest of us? We get diddly.
Anyone else care to weigh in on this? I'm especially curious to hear from those who think this is an acceptable practice.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I've spent hundreds of hours over the last couple of years participating in essay-reading projects for national educational testing companies based in Iowa City, IA (and elsewhere), have developed a healthy regard and admiration for neural networks implemented in wetware (collaborating human test raters), and have to say I'm skeptical of claims that software can interpret anything important or consequential in the essays I've personally had before my eyes. In particular, I doubt the ability of software to recognize genius, especially genius buried under a thick layer of ESL ("English as a second language") errors or social disadvantage. I doubt the ability of software to recognize anything but a small core of mediocre constructs and pedestrian insights, and feel rather strongly that its use is a serious violation of civil rights.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
You're quoting Richard Stallman as though he is making an original or insightful statement. He's not; in fact, he's very likely quoting someone else. In any case, he's simply describing a well-known legal concept that's hundreds if not thousands of years old. There's even a name for it: the idea/expression dichotomy. In U.S. case law, it dates back at least 125 years to Baker v. Selden. In British common law, it's nearly twice that old. And of course there was Seneca, in the first century A.D., who stated that "ideas are common property."
Can we still leave a sense of style and variety in writing, please? I don't think Bukowski would have scored too well on the Grade-O-Tron Essay-Matic 5000.
You know what?
> How long before he's replaced entirely by his own program to cut down on staff costs?
The sooner the better.
how long until someone write an algorithm to brute-force come up with the perfect essay.
I mean. the man wrote the fitness function. lets write the rest! bam, hit the GO button, you're done. auto pulitzer prize.
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
This begs the question, are you mis-apropriating your apriorities? Your neices will find it harder to graduates if they are mis-managed in this way. Better to go straight from highschool before they forget their highschool educations.
From the article:
The computer-generated scores count for about a third to a quarter of students' final grade for Brent's class. Students have challenged the scores, but if they don't use the right lingo in their papers, they're out of luck. "In sociology, we want them to learn the terms," Brent said.
With up to 140 students enrolled in his writing-intensive, introductory sociology course, Brent estimates he's saved more than 200 hours of work per semester with Qualrus. The final papers, which he does read, are usually much better as a result of Qualrus, too. [Emphasis mine]
The computer programs just teach students (as in "training") to use the right keywords (search engine optimization, anyone?) and improve their writing style in their essays.
Grammar and spelling are ALWAY important!
if rules are given, they are enforced, because what good are rules if they aren't enforced? that doesn't mean that the lesson you should learn is to just blindly follow rules.
if you have zany rules popping up in college assignments, i agree profs probably aren't trying to be devious, but i'm not sure if i agree with the idea that they were just trying to teach you to conform to their rules. most of those rules i encountered were justified with an argument that they make the grading process easier. but i didn't run into any rules in college that had no reasoning behind them at all, other than to teach conformity. often it also serves to give some objectivity to the grade.
but i agree that the material you learn in college is generally less important than the lessons you learn. the lesson i learned was a bit different, though. lessons like you described were the type i was taught in elementary school.
the types of lessons i learned in college, and they come from experience where you don't receive the grade you feel you deserve and similar situations, are lessons that stick with you. what i took out of it was a sense of when need to conform and when you need to speak up and voice a dissenting opinion.
personally, i'd rather engage my boss with an interesting argument and ultimately lose out (even to the boss's ignorance) and conform than just blindly follow instructions -- i think perhaps the boss will get more out of it as well.
What is the assignment in Calc I for?
First, it's to force you to learn the topic, and give you guidance on what you need to understand. This requires no marking at all.
Second, it's to give you feedback on what you did wrong. A computer marking you would give you feedback something like how a compiler does when you write code: awful. Beginning programmers frequently need expert help in understanding compiler errors, so I doubt a machine would be any good at telling you that you got the limits of the integral backward.
Third, the assignment is there to teach you how to write: that is, how to present work in an intelligable way. This is common to all subjects, and I seriously doubt that any computer program will tell you how to write something that humans can understand.
Forth, it's to give you a grade. This is the least important reason for the assignment.
In some cases, it was better to not turn in anything at all.
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt" -- Mark Twain
If the program works properly, it doesn't matter. All that would happen when a student 'tweaked' their essay is that they'd have made their essay better. And they'd deserve a higher grade for it. The fact that the program provides a set of guidelines for what makes a good essay is reasonable.
The only way an unworthy essay can gain is if the guidelines that the program runs off of are worthless. In which case he shouldn't be using it.
The only cause for concern is the quality/validity of the program.
What's in a Sig?
A similar program was developed at the University of Colorado back in 1998, using Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA). LSA works by creating a table with rows being terms, and columns being documents. Then the cells of the table are filled with the frequency that each term shows up in each document.
It uses singular value decomposition, a general form of factor analysis, to condense a very large matrix of word-by-context data into a much smaller, but still large-typically 100-500 dimensional-representation
The similarity between resulting vectors for words and contexts, as measured by the cosine of their contained angle, has been shown to closely mimic human judgments of meaning similarity and human performance based on such similarity in a variety of ways.
To assess the quality of essays, LSA is first trained on domain-representative text. Then student essays are characterized by LSA vectors of their contained words and compared with essays of known quality on degree of conceptual relevance and amount of relevant content. Over many diverse topics, LSA scores have agreed with human experts as well as expert scores agreed with each other.
some basic information
Cool applets that let you play with LSA
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
Is no one else bothered by the fact that he was "paid" $100,000 in public funds to develop this and is now marketing it for personal profit?
Talk about free publicity. How about open source code that can do the same?
I had profs who wanted you to regurgitate what they fed you; that was all you needed to get a good grade. I had others who reserved As for those who really *thought*, and could communicate those thoughts well. The trick was learning which type was which before the first essay.
I seriously doubt this sociology prof has developed a program that could recognize innovative thinking if it bit the computer on the I/O bus. So if it's Sociology 101 and they don't want thinking, just regurgitation, great. But it's still (I'd bet) useless for anything more than that.
As a Humanities student, I find the lack of ANY standard for grading papers to be the most truly frusterating experience of my life. I know it's subjective in sciences/engineering too, but there's never a point where you look at your paper and think, "Yeah, that's an A right there." That is, unless you know your professor really well.
Many classes are based on essays alone. In fact, a multiple-choice, or even short answer test, is a godsent because you can demonstrate that you are unequivocably right in some fashion or another. With essays as the only (or dominant) criteria, you are totally at the mercy of the style preferences and personal gripes of the grader. A close friend of mine - a bona fide genius, might I add - was graded a D on a paper by tenured faculty, because regardless of the strength of her argument, the prof didn't like her ideas. As soon as the words, "Bias complaint" came out of her mouth, he bumped her up to an A-. I have been graded a B- by a graduate student, and had it moved to an A by the professor because the grad was incompetant in the subject.
I look at this stuff with my mouth agape. I'm a brilliant student, yet I cannot get above a 3.6. Those who do fall into one of two categories. A friend of mine named Dan exemplifies the first: he is a 6'1", rail thin guy who wears the same formal black outfit every day and never, ever talks to anyone. The second is willing to sell their soul to a professor, caters to what they like, goes to their office hours for no particular reason, flirts with them intensely, and occasionally fucks them.
So, yeah, some kind of objective grading system would be a boon to literature programs everywhere.
I understand how academia works, but instead of selling this software the professor should get a grant and open-source his work. Students and teachers alike could benefit from Qualrus and derivitives that would certainly arise out of making it an open-source project. In addition, the project would benefit from the input of other people with semantic analysis expertise. Otherwise, the market will keep going the direction that the article covered where everybody is using some different software to evaluate student's writings. If there were a single definitive resource for written evaluation, then there would likely be an improvement in students writing from high school on up as professors and teachers adopt a standard software for written evaluation. But maybe that would sound too much like charity for the capitalist acting (though likely not capitalist minded) sociology professor...
Grad students will always be cheaper...
What would this professor think if he realises best graded essays are written by a computer?. Probably, if a computer programme knows how good (and bad) essays look like, it may be (easily) modified to write a good essay. Take a look at this.... ahref=http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/>
I would like to think that if a sociology student is good enough to write a an essay-generator programme, then a good grade is quite enough well deserved....
....a human can do things a computer will never be able to to. Period. There is much more to an essay then flow and technical aspects. There are little bits in there like cleverness that a computer cant pick up on. A computer cant tell you if something is written in a such as a way as to make it easy to understand by the reader. Things like that are important. Plus it will not be too long before someone figures out how to trick the program using another program to gernerate a nice flow of meaningless words.
for large values of 2
Well, at least it might get you a space in National Geographic (no, they do not disprove evolution):
1 /feature1/http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/ 0411/feature1/>
ahref=http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/041
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
$75,955n cy=all&txtLName=brent&txtFName=ed&tTitle=&Submit=S earch
http://www.sos.mo.gov/BlueBook/results.asp?selAge
When was the last time a sociologist wrote a sophisticated program. I mean the way he is advertisng is it, he proclaims the program is capable of understanding the document. Thats insane. Do the guys at the AI lab at MIT know that some sociologist in Missouri is kicking their asses.
If the NSF (US Government) paid to develop the thing, the US citizens already OWN it. Where's my free copy?
My spelling is usually pretty good. Oh well.
My other first post is car post.
Check out this website https://68.104.118.126/ , which is a test pilot for developing similar online paper scoring. The site is not yet finished, but they will give you a free test account if you ask them (use the contact page). The site is designed to augment the human teacher's feedback and scoring, not replace the human. There are several privates schools testing the site for usability and integration with their existing curriculum.
The site usually generates a report with various scores (numbers easily converted to letter grades) for you paper within 5 minutes. The report includes statistics and grammar/usage advice for revising the paper.
Also, the site provides 3 demo accounts: a directed student account, an instructor account, and an independent student account. The instuctor account can view all the papers scored for the linked directed student accounts.
Geez, wouldn't want to have to *work* would he?
How long until the administration says "See ya lazy prof, but don't touch your office computer..."
In Soviet Russia....
Your small shell script replaces YOU!!
If her classes were "total Marxist," obviously she wasn't doing a very good job. How can you take such an anti-Marxist and pro-capitalist stance when you obviously don't know what the fuck Marxism is?
Get a damn clue.
I am sure the program is cool and all but for this to be of real value to him, he must be a structure nazi. If he was grading for strong arguements, well thought ideas and good research then a program will not be able to help (unless he has made a breakthrough in AI while the world was asleep).
I miss the Karma Whores.
I am a student who works as a writing tutor for other students, and frankly a lot of the professors could use our services too. But no, that would hurt their pride.
I can't tell you how many times I have been in the opposite situation from the parent post, where I am taking an exam/ doing an assignment and trying to figure out what the heck the question is supposed to mean. It seems a lot of teachers have trouble putting together intelligible sentences too. And these are usually the same teachers who insist to their students, "you must use complete sentences in your answers"!
Don't take a contrary opinion to the professor or to popular opinion on the college campus.
I'm a philosophy TA. If you're in a philosophy class, don't follow this advice.
Philosophy instructors are looking for three things when they read a student's paper: clear writing, an accurate explanation of a published argument, and (if the assignment calls for it) a reasoned response to that argument. Most students in intro philosophy classes have trouble presenting other people's views. When I get a paper that explains a published view clearly and offers a well-reasoned critique, I am shocked and awed. Do I care whether I agree with the paper's conclusion? Not really.
Suppose I believe that P, and you don't understand why I think P. In fact, you think you have an argument that P is false. What happens if you try to write a paper arguing that P is true? Well, you're not going to offer good reasons to believe that P, because you don't understand why someone would believe that P. Your paper will be mud. Better to explain your reasons for thinking not-P. Then you'll have at least a fighting chance of writing something coherent.
Sounds like a filter that will take your shitty essay and spit out one that will give you top marks is easy enough -- it could seriously be rapidly developed using perl or python.
Linux at home
Something is wrong here:
Meanwhile, Brent, who received a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop Qualrus, is now looking for distributors for the product. He's in talks with several textbook publishers, which he declined to name.
Brent said he plans to donate 1 percent of profits generated through the sale of the program
This guy gets a freaking grant from the NSF to do some research at a public university, and he is turning around and teaming up with a publisher to make profits on the work? Where the hell are the checks on balances on this? The work should be property of the university or managed by the NSF. And universities around the nation should be allowed access to the work. If he wants to make a quick buck off it, he should fund the project with his own damn money. What a leech.
Despite your nerd fantasies, computers can't "rank" reasoning and thought, and (anticipating the propellerhead response here) if the point of the paper is to test for keyword memorization only, then the professor is doing his students a major disservice.
Pathetic.
This sort of thing is, in the long run, going to save a great deal of time. Countless thousands of man-hours saved in essay grading for everything from weekly papers to standardized tests. But the cost associated with it is pretty high: such a system is inevitably going to grade for conformity.
Already, there is a great deal of belief that "this is the way x must be done," not because x is any better than y or z, but because it is written. The tools and opinions and beliefs that are rare, though they may be more valuable or better-written than those that are standard and conformist, will inevitably receive poorer scores in such systems.
That being said, they often receive poorer scores anyway. But it's a question of replacing a human grader, that may be small-minded or large-minded, with a computerized grader, that is quantifiably small-minded.
No doubt there will be cries for each. "Little Johny's smarter than your computer thinks," and "The Computer knows that Little Johnny is smarter than you think."
Prepare for a new generation of controversy...
FUCK YOU and your little un-fill-in-able rectangles!....rectangles?!???
NOT ONLY ARE THEY RECTANGLES, THEY ARE VERY SKINNY!!!
a pain in the ass!!
DIE SCANTRON!
(/rant)
Oh, and I figure I work about 20 hours/week/course, plus 5-20 hours for advising and administrative duties. Given my school's teaching load, that's 45-80 hours a week while classes are in session. And 25-30 when they aren't. These numbers are very typical, I think, based on talking to many professors at many kinds of institutions, from community colleges to the Ivies. Tenured professors do have job security, but most people who teach college courses are not tenured. Some faculties are unionized, but many (I would guess a strong majority) are not, and unionization of the faculty is illegal at some kinds of institutions. In short, you're making a good point about the differences in professorial attention to writing, but you have no bloody idea what you're talking about regarding the professional lives of college teachers.
I basically agree with the sentence, "If a professor does not care enough to read my papers, then to hell with him." (Or her.) But students can generally avoid disaster scenarios by choosing institutions and professors within institutions who value careful teaching. Some institutions punish professors for putting a lot of time into teaching. Many others (including mine, a small liberal arts college) reward careful teaching first. Here, a professor grading with a computer algorithm would be scandalous. And in any institution, a little snooping around in advance helps a lot.
...to use help files? Or Google?
Typical testing for computer skills would have us believe so. Most of the questions on them, I've found, are testing you for how much of an object model you've memorized, or how many niggling UI details you've memorized, or how many levels deep on a menu hierarchy of a particular frontend you've memorized. They focus on knowing jargon and/or memorization of specific programs, rather than what is really worthwhile: the ability to think in a useful way, and to learn these details on the fly.
That's why I maintain that certifications like MCSE or A+ are worse than meaningless.
And soon, it appears, sociology degrees will be too. I don't beleive for one second that they've written a program that can follow thinking and decide whether it's valid. People will essentially learn to feed the program the text patterns it's looking for, get their diplomas, and wonder what went wrong.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
And yes, the people editting such a journal of nonsense should be relieved of their teaching duties, offices and probably their salaries as well.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.