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?"

Comments

Re:Wouldn't want to be in his class.

[samtihen]

I go to the University of Missouri. I wouldn't want to be in his class either. Hmm, I don't have enough of the keywords in my paper? How about you actually read the paper you made me write?

http://sociology.missouri.edu/Faculty_and_Staff/Fa culty/Edward_Brent.html

A While

[rm999]

"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.

Fire the professor...

[John Seminal]

This reminds me of something that was in the papers a few weeks ago. A professor and graduate students wanted to show that most journals will publish anything if it sounds "academic" enough. So they wrote a paper that was hog-wash, made no point, was just a bunch of academic sounding prose. And guess what? They got published.

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.

Better teaching tool than grading tool

[raehl]

My spelling has improved massively with the advent of the red squigle under the mispelled word - and not just because I fix the error, but I now just don't make the errors in the first place. (The green squiggle is not so useful - sometimes it's just quite wrong.)

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.

Re:Better teaching tool than grading tool

[mopslik]

the red squigle under the mispelled word

Back when I was grading papers, I used to recommend the exact opposite to the students -- turn off the "instant" spell-checker, then run the "full" spell-checker and re-read the paper. I found that, in many cases, students would correct anything that had a red squiggle underneath it, but would get a false sense of security that all of the errors had been detected by the word processor.

Oddly enough, when they had a squiggle-free page before them, they were much more attentive to detail and caught the "spelled-correctly-but-used-inappropriately" words.

Re:term papers...

[John Seminal]

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

I really, really, really wish someone told me this. I lost a letter grade in a class because I had a differing point of view from the professor. I wrote a kick ass term paper, I spent countless hours in the library doing research, I had other people proof read my paper. It was one of the best papers I wrote. But it was the exact opposite of what the professor believed.

We expect our teachers will grade us on our work. But every now and then we get a professor who probably spends too much time writing letters to the editorial section of the new york times.

Re:term papers...

[Louis Guerin]

My wife got a grad-level essay back with B on it, knowing that she'd gone against the opinion of the HOD and course convener, who'd marked it. No surprise. She submitted it for remarking (where it gets sent to another faculty member at a sister university) and it just came back with an A on it - overall gain about 15 percentage points.

You CAN disagree with the prof, but you'd better be prepared to go into bat.

L

It's about following instructions.

[jbarr]

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.

You make some interesting points.

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!

Re:Cheating

[Lonewolf666]

Heh. If so, it might be an interesting challenge to run a genetic algorithm against the program, trying to "evolve" the paper into a perfect match for Qualrus' preferences.

If done successfully, you might get a good grade in sociology for something that would deserve a good grade in computer science ;-)