Computers To Mark English Essays

digitig writes "According to The Guardian, computers are to be used in the UK to mark English examination essays. 'Pearson, the American-based parent company of Edexcel, is to use computers to "read" and assess essays for international English tests in a move that has fueled speculation that GCSEs and A-levels will be next. ... Pearson claims this will be more accurate than human marking.' Can computers now understand all the subtle nuances of language, or are people going to have to learn an especially bland form of English to pass exams?"

Comments

Re:Don't they already do this?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Grammar and spelling mistakes are a symptom of sloppiness, as are poor reasoning, lack of organization, and lack of adequate support. .... Intelligent, methodical, and rational people care enough to follow them.

Thank you for giving us our daily dose of prejudice.

Here's the bottom line. Spelling and grammar, while lauded by many, are simply not very important. Knowing where and how to use semi-colons is not, and never has been a useful or laudable skill in all but a handful of professions. Knowing or caring what a participle actually is, is a topic of interest only to a trained linguist. Most people do not, and should not need to know these things. The style rules are essentially followed most rigorously by cowards. People too terrified of breaking rank or decorum and who will willingly and eventually gratefully follow a body of strict order laid down by people who lived over a hundred years ago. These people wrap themselves in knots in their efforts to stay on track and their writing suffers accordingly.

Now, I'm not saying that we should all jst gv up & on ower snnantX and speeln altagather, but there is no point in being anal retentive and insisting that everyone conform their writing and speech to the south eastern standard, as it has been interpreted by people with no real skill other than a love of proving their linguistic superiority over others. This rigid and unbending insistence on "proper" standards is robbing the written english word of the diversity encountered in its spoken form. Every day I hear people where I live uses phrases like, "They'd be (They do be) going to....", yet I have only seen these things actually written down a handful of times in my entire life. I'm sure there are countless other such colloquialisms which are similarly snubbed in "proper english" circles.

Basically, what I am saying is that the collective "style guide" is and always has been a crock. It is an arbitrary and exclusionary set of principles for written english, with no objective or fundamental underpinning in any for of english that is or ever was spoken. The single best modern day wordsmiths can be found "rapping" in popular records in a dialect and with a style of grammar that breaks almost every rule in the style book, yet is unquestionably a more potent and superior form of communication for the purposes it is intended to serve.

In a way, the logical conclusion for the enforcement of the style guides can their eventually implementation on a computer. The style guides belong more to the realm of capricious, cold and uncaring logic than they ever did to the realm of human communication or expression.