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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?"
Qualrus doesn't operate using a set grading criteria, but trains based on the users' grading markups. Therefore, you'd need the teacher's copy (complete with its "learned" patterns) to fool the system. Actually Ed Brent encourages the students to use Qualrus to write rough drafts, as it gives instant feedback - arguably a better learning technique from a usability standpoint (faster feedback == more retention).
According to ETS, the e-rater agrees with the human grader 98% of the time.
My userid is prime!
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.