Slashdot Mirror
Computers Could Grade Essay Tests Better Than Profs
An anonymous reader writes "Robot essay graders could be the answer to grade inflation. New software being tested turns over the task of grading to computers — this article has an interactive demo of the software. One professor says the computer is far fairer than human graders, who get tired and become inconsistent, or play favorites."
But then who will be the teacher's pet?
I once got an F on a paper from a TA who wrote in the margins "How dare you try to say what Shakespeare was thinking!" Um, that's what literary analysis IS, to some extent. You try to place someone's written works within the context of their culture and society at large and reconstruct their thought processes and views on the world. But that TA was an asshole and had it out for me, and many of us complained about him bitterly for years afterward. The only person who got an A in that entire section was one cute girl.
As long as the robo-grader also includes a plagiarism check, I'd be okay with it. My husband is a professor and most of his failed papers are a result of TurnItIn.com catching outright plagiarism.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I had a prof in literature who only graded well if you made your critical essay about sexual imagery. At one point I gave up trying to "be me" and went whole hog, way overboard, almost parodying the over sexualized essay. And I scored an "A" for the the first time. Lesson learned? Sometimes it's OK to tell the boss what he wants to hear and do it his way, as long as it doesn't cost you anything, and nobody gets hurt. And, of course, life's not fair.
I can't say if a computer is better than a human at marking, but in my engineering subjects, when my name was on the test papers I did not get very good grades (actually at least grade lower than expected). But as soon as all the students were given anonymous numbers the grades went up. Conclusion, the staff could no longer decide to give better grades to their pet students. So in theory, there could be many students who get better grades because there is no more favouritism.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
What's wrong your Grad Students too busy playing Farmville to grade papers?
My essay grades in college humanities courses were terrible until I started trying to figure out the political slant of my professor (or TA if the TA is the grader) and wrote papers supporting those views (and to be fair, those views weren't always left-leaning ones). I went from a C paper student to a low-A paper student in the blink of an eye.
Consistency is a fair point, but playing favorites? Isn't this what anonymous marking codes/IDs are for? (Or at least, that's what happens in the majority of universities in the UK)
but it really needs to check for plagiarism. I saw a load of it up at Colorado State.
In addition, it would ideally be able to handle lab books. I remember grading micro-bio 201 lab books back in the 80's, and I was getting tired after the first 30. The second 30 was a pain. The last 30, well, we finished the grading at a pizza joint over beer. I suspect that was how grade inflation happens.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The GRE exam uses software to grade the essay portion for quite a while, along with a human grader. If these two scores different by a point or more, then it is forwarded to another human grader and the final score will be the average of the three entities.
That cuts the cost of running the exam, considering the cost of incurring an extra human grader.
It will soon pop up everywhere at university level, when the budget cuts are everywhere.
New Economic Perspectives
easyer to cheat / keyword jam also auto grading systems can miss the point and fail a good paper or pass a bad off topic one.
Hasn't that always been the case? I can recount dozens of personal examples in undergraduate/graduate (high school was too distant, sorry! But nor did I really take that seriously) where outside the multiple choice or true-and-false realm, there is always that element of human favoritism and non-neutral judgement involved. Certain people would get a lower/higher grade on a paper/research project that had really close ideology, thoughts or facts, that matched the next person (all cheating trolls stay in your cave). More of the educator's time is then spent 'justifying' their grade than the time it took to grade the item to begin with at that point, IMHO.
It would be a very logical feat to have a knowledgeable, computer system be educated enough to look at styles, patterns for topic(s) 'xyz' than it would would be worth just to remove the human judgmental element factor. IBM Watson, I presume?
My wife just got done with a course, and it was online, it graded her wrong cause she clicked the edge of the button instead of the dead center. it doesn't matter she clicked the right button, it only matters that she did not click it DEAD PERFECT CENTER
so no these systems cant grade better cause they are made by teachers who don't proof read their own shit (for example there was many times she would be taking a quiz and the answer would be in 2 chapters ahead) made by flunkie CS 101 students that just got introduced to the concept of a bounding box via web image mapping.
What's up with the mass media headlines? Reading the summary actually makes me dumber. It talks about "computers" like they are sentient and grades the tests instead. Having professors first strictly defining the rules, entering them into software and having a computer evaluate those rules is still "professors grading the essays". It's self evident that the grading is better if it's more strictly defined.
Wow, I can build a house faster with this hammer. Headline: Hammers Could Build Houses Faster Than Construction Workers (In Cyberspace)
Unless they've made some impressive advances in natural-language interpretation in the past few years that haven't trickled out into other products, I'm a bit puzzled as to how this scheme is supposed to work.
Even the (comparatively much easier) tasks of spelling and grammar checking result in a fairly steady stream of mistakes from computer systems. I can't exactly summon much optimism for the likely outcome of such a system trying to distinguish between a paper with a well supported thesis and a paper that contains some declarative statements, a few quotations, and the word "therefore" at intervals.
On the plus side, it should be pretty trivial to get the machines to do the same lousy job without the slightest consideration of the student's name/status/cuteness/willingness to flatter the professor; but what use is purely objective execution of lousy work?
more classes need to move away from the written test and to a more hands on / maybe even no test class.
That fixes 2 things the people who just cram for the test and pass but I have little to no idea about the content or how to use it. As well as people who know what they are doing and are bad test takes / not that good at witting essays. Also cut's down on the people who pay for paper / essays witting services.
The grading work in sciences (chemisty) can be extremely easy or hard. If you figure it partial credit and do all the calculations with their number they screwed up on step 2. With teaching load at some universities, this is not a viable approach (yes spreadsheet this, do that, everyone finds a different way to mess doing things up). My grades tended to rise almost a letter grade as I got towards the end and would basically just check that they had it within an order of magnitude (Freshman classes, easy reports). The 20 page monstrosities I was guilty of scanning the "smarter" students finding an error giving them a 95 and let it be, I admit. I never targeted anyone for lower grading but almost the opposite effect of the freshman thing had happened as each lab is more or less the same and I'd peruse the smart kids first, the concept(s) they skipped/didn't understand were obvious, so the last student far far more likely to get a bad grade.
That's a pretty good idea. Wish my teachers followed that in school. Then again they probably could have told it was me by handwriting, but I guess they use computers for that now.
And the IBM system give a F for saying Toronto is in canada. I say let the computer help but make it so there is no AUTO FAIL and make a real person review at least some flagged papers.
As someone who never effected the curve or caught the affection of a teacher, I welcome our new digital grader overlords.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Let's be honest here, everyone had at least one teacher where it was obvious what you had to argue for or against to get a good grade. My German teacher was an ex-army officer. Take a wild guess what position you should take when the topic is the role of the armed forces in the history of the nation.
It was easy to get a good grade. Why? Because you knew, no matter how harebrained or outlandish your arguments were, if it was what he wanted to hear, a good grade was your reward. Simply and plainly. Once you learned that it's not your job to argue with your teacher but to write what he wants to hear, you have a much easier life.
And it transfers to work as well. My life was a living hell while I tried to achieve security when everyone just wanted compliance. Since I dropped the idea that we should be secure, everything's running a lot smoother, everyone's happy and when (not if) the shit hits the fan, I even get to say "told you so".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While you can get better than blind luck accuracy out of robo-graders, they are still easy to fool. They can play with coherence, but none of them has a chance at the semantic level, so you can replicate basic essay structure with nonsense content and they won't know the difference.
A robo-grader that grades only based on length is nearly as good as a human grader, and takes far less investment.
I would love to see this grade a literary essay, especially a post-structuralist one, something that takes creative thought to comprehend.
I wasn't aware we now have access to AI this advanced. Spell check and (maybe) grammar check are reasonable, but how does a computer assess a student's understanding and mastery of a topic? How does the computer recognize originality, creativity, or intuitive leaps? Can the software recognize an effective argument, a convincing solution?
I'm a geology and earth science professor. When I give writing assignments, I'm usually more interested in the content than the mechanics. I'll tolerate a few spelling and grammar mistakes if the content of the essay or paper demonstrates that the student understands concepts presented in class and, even better, is THINKING about the implications.
For intro. writing classes, where grammar and structure are the point of the assignment, computerized grading is understandable; especially if your school has you teaching classes with more than 50 students (which is another issue entirely). But, in my experience at least, proficiency at writing is not always directly correlated with proficiency at class material.
But the objectivity of the grades has nothing to do with the problem of grade inflation. Professors intent on inflating grades will simply reduce the weight of tests as part of the overall grade and count class participation, homework, etc. more /or/ add a flat number of points across the board to the results of the computer scored tests.
Grade inflation, after all, isn't simple bias. We're not speaking of professors grading up people (or views) that they like and grading down people (or views) that they dislike. Rather we're speaking of professors that systematically give higher grades than they ought for one reason or the other. Some do this for ideological reasons. Others do it because they're tired of fighting students (or parents) that complain. The end result is an 'A' no longer means 'excellence in performance' but is pretty much the default grade for anyone that do a moderate amount of work.
I had a teacher that was reviled by just about the entire campus such was her utter lack of competence. I had initially thought it would be possible to go through her exams by bullshitting, but then I stumbled on something that made me understand some of it.
I had an appointment with her for reasons I do not recall and she was grading exams still. As I waited, she started discussing with another teacher, careless about me and many other students listening in. After the discussion ended, she decided to raise some grades by nearly 10%! Thing is, she did not back up to recalculate exams she had already evaluated, she just changed the grades of a few students and moved on...
Considering her evaluation was based off a handful of vague keywords with grades written besides them (little to no useful margin notes or anything of the sort), you'd think she just rolled some dice and picked the grades from there.
And that's notwithstanding errors made by teachers that, if you don't press, can hurt a lot. I won as much as 20% on an exam due to faulty evaluation from careless teachers.
I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad idea, but it won't do anything to change grade inflation. In my experience (as a TA for a number of different classes), college professors look at the point totals at the end of the semester and determine the letter grade cutoffs by hand so that they have the grade distribution they want. I'm not saying they're going through and making sure specific students get a particular grade, just that they want, say 50% A's 30% B's and 20% C's and they'll put the cutoffs where they need to be for that to happen. Just because the essays are graded tougher doesn't mean they can't still give half the class an A.
AIs to grade the papers I would assume would result in some folks developing AIs to create the papers...
You only need to look at the job done by automatic translators to see how primitive current systems are at understanding the structure of a sentence, let alone its meaning, or how it relates to other sentences.
Automated grading systems look for keyword and "key statements". If you write A=B in one sentence and A!=B in another, an automated system will tend to either grade that as "correct" or, at most, "neutral". A human grader will (correctly) evaluate it as "worse than wrong", because giving the wrong answer could be the result of a simple mistake, but giving two contradictory answers is proof that the author didn't even understand the basic concept he's talking about.
The reason why grades (especially college grades) are inflated is that education is big business. Flunk a student and he might leave college. Pass a bad student and your college gets next year's tuition money. I give seminars as part of a couple of graduate courses, and I've been pressured to do just that (though I never caved in).
The only way to fix education is to make sure that every student pays the same and every teacher is paid the same. It's the same basic principle applied to scientific studies (eliminate all other variables so you can focus on the actual performance of each student and teacher), but somehow people think it's "evil communism"...
First, for those who didn't read TFA, computers play only a small role on a handful of essays. Most of the article is in reference to having a 3rd party grade anonymized tests, rather than leaving it to the professor or TA. During college, I had a job as one of those graders.
We worked for five hours a day in the evening, though we could leave early and get the full pay if we finished all our papers. Most of the tests would be on general topics, but occasionally we'd get tests that required specific knowledge. In those cases, only qualified graders could review them, and we were given cheat sheets to make sure we didn't make factual mistakes. Essays were generally graded on a 1-5 scale (or a 0 if the essay was a blank page or similar). Each essay would be graded by two people, with a third breaking the tie in the event of a disagreement. However, we trained to be extremely consistent in the grading, so disagreements were rare and never more than a one point difference.
A few times a day, we would get fake essays intended to test our grading skills. For example, an essay that was supposed to be a perfect example of a 4 would be given to you with all the rest. If you gave it a 4, you get +1 point. Give it a 3 or 5, you get zero points. Give it a 2 or less, and you lose a point. If you accumulate a lot of points, you get a bonus up to 50% of your pay. If your total score goes too negative, you get fired.
It was a pretty good job, as crappy part-time "work your way through college" jobs go. The best part was whenever we got to grade essays by little kids. They were harder to score accurately -- it's hard to look past the abysmal handwriting and frequent misspellings. But they were frequently adorable and unintentionally hilarious.
Most likely due to the fact that HUMANS, no matter how hard they try, will be biased in reviewing. Most college professors are liberal. Not saying that is a bad thing or a good thing, it is just the reality of the situation. If a professor is grading papers and comes across some student that instead of keeping quiet about his/her political inclination, is outspoken in class, that teacher will even if they try not to, will be harder on a conservative student, than a liberal student. It's just human nature. A computer on the other hand, will not have that problem.
Have written a few things, not including all the crap I spew here, I can tell you that any judgements beyond syntax, grammar, and semantics are purely emotional. That is because all human reasoning boils down to feelings. If that bothers you or intrigues you or bores you, then there you go.
When machines are used to judge people's essays in subjective ways, either their state machines will be unemotional and miss much of the contextual meaning of writing, or they will be patterned after some designers' emotional criteria or sets of emotion-like heuristics and largely be non-evolving until their algorithms improve to adapt as we do. The latter would probably violate at least one of Asimov's three laws, if not all of them.
Slashdot: stop deleting my comments, I'm bringing up fair points. I am a lit major and these are things I've gone through and reasons why I'm skeptical about a computer grading any assignment for anyone in my major as any literary criticism doesn't require merely an understanding of grammar, syntax or algebraic relationships of ideas, but being able to comprehend the synthesis of (often times unrelated) ideas.
Here's one example, that I will re-post. Last year a friend of mine in gothic literature wrote an essay on The Monk, for which he received an A. His thesis was that by the end of the novel, the reader "becomes" Ambrosio, the character who narrates, while the real "narrator" of the story is the main temptress/antagonist; which implies that this temptress has more critical distance and knowledge of the actual story than Ambrosio, the supposed narrator.
Here's another, more common, example. One scholarly essay we had to read described the function of the veil in Ann Radcliffe's novels. While I can't remember every facet of this essay, a point I remember was that the veil was used as a way to build temporary tension between superficial and obscured "truths" (ie a dead body), which was really among the first times that an author started to use a veil in this manner (historically).
I'd really like to know how a computer would be able to see the synthesis, let alone appreciate it, in essays like these. I just do not believe it can. It would require something close to actual artificial intelligence, which, to my knowledge, we do not have. This is not like Watson, who hears a word, looks it up, and repeats its most common factor; this is not like spell-check, that compares a database of spelling and grammatical rules to a paper and points out inconsistencies between that paper and the database. This requires deep thought.
If these machines CAN do just that, then I will be taken aback.
My partner is just starting an MA teaching program, and she's been ranting a lot about the utter uselessness of grades and standardized testing. Apparently, there are decades of research establishing that standardized tests fail to measure anything but performance on standardized tests, and grades measure little besides conformism, self-discipline, and a lack of creativity. (And self-discipline is not always a good thing -- why are you working so hard at doing things you don't really believe are worth doing?)
My first reaction to the headline was that, if computers are better at grading than people, and we know many of the essays are plagiarized from essays found through Google, why have any human participation in the process?
More seriously, one learns to write well through reading a lot, writing a lot, and occasionally listening to criticism. I think we'd do a better job teaching writing by having students in a class read each other's writing and make comments, and simply pass those who participate and fail those who don't, with no further assessment than that.
Of course, that presumes an education system designed to help people learn to become fully participating members of a community and to lead rich, fulfilling lives. As things stand, mass education systems seem designed to produce some dubious justification for burying most people alive, while selecting a conformist and quiescent minority for middle-class careers.
This is a very revealing post.
I had good grades and no complaints, but now I write poorly in a mechanical sense, but far better in a wisdom sense.
This post gives the impression essays are strictly mechanics, which would be a horrible inditement of education!
Who's smarter, someone sharp with arithmetic or calculus! This is rediculous.
It must be a neural net or similar algorithm with a training set. Boy, what a sorry state we're in if a unforeseen insight on an essay problem cannot win beaucoup points.
No number of unoriginal ideas can add up to a original idea in real life. There are tons of people who just don't grasp the concept of why the music band with a new sound wins and the copycats don't. All the copycats are walking around thinking life is not fair.
Based on what I know about the current state of AI, the essays that computers can grade fairly are NOT worth writing.
Students and professors should try doing something useful... Something that pushes human intellectual boundaries and imagination, explores human emotions, discusses ethics and moral issues. These are not topics that today's artificial intelligence can handle.
more classes need to move away from the written test and to a more hands on / maybe even no test class.
Good luck implementing that approach for journalism and creative writing courses! In some fields being able to write well is a vital skill. Even in sciences and engineering, the person who can communicate their ideas clearly and persuasively in writing will have a big edge over one who has similar technical skills but can't write well.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
If they can't improve the grades of the cute coeds????
You've got that backwards. Written tests are of absolutely no value in Journalism or art. You might do a quiz covering something like ethics, but in terms of the actual practices you're not going to test that in any sort of useful way using a written test.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm ..."
"... The preceding three results should be enough to cause any conscientious educator to rethink the practice of giving students grades. But as they say on late-night TV commercials, Wait -- there's more.
Key points:
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself.
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks.
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective.
5. Grades distort the curriculum.
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.
7. Grades encourage cheating.
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships with students.
9. Grades spoil students' relationships with each other.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
As a professor, I can attest that the diagnosis of the problem here is too simplistic and the proposed 'solution' here is unnecessarily complicated. While it is the case that TAs and insecure professors will often inflate grades as they are scared of student appeals, the solution is to employ most experienced professors. There are also relatively simple methods that can be used to prevent grades becoming skewed. For instance, it is easy to grade anonymously. Just ensure that identifying details only go on the first page and turn the work over and grade from the back. One can also compare class mean and median scores (and SDs) with the scores from other sections of the same class. Such methods can ensure fair and consistent grading, without grade inflation. I always use such methods to great effect.
Aren't they a culprit too in grade inflation debacle ???
I was a TA in a far east university in an Engineering department. Generally I consider my self a tough marker, as I expect students to arrive at answers with right logical reasoning. Having said that, I usually had a partial blind eye for students who has genuine drive towards studies -- post grad research types --, because their future shouldn't be eclipsed by a one bad grade. Also I highly control the grade distribution, such that only 5-10% of the class will get A-grade.
First time when I marked the maths assignments, the feedback was horrible. I was told off by the lecturer for marking strictly, and then he increased marks of everybody by some percentage. Then I was instructed "not to go through the workings" and "give full marks if you see the answer". Since then, more than half the class gets A-grade.
The problem here is, lecturers are evaluated every semester by handing out questionnaires to students (in that university). Bad feedback can kill lecturer's x-mas bonus to getting a promotion in the department. So him (and many others) end up pleasing students not to hurt his career as an academic.
On a separate note, most of engineering course work are now done in software level. As a consequence, hardly any hardware related experiments and report writing. Downside of all this is, it is impossible to catch plagiarism; as all experiments in a software produces same outcome, more or less. Unless all students get it wrong, everybody ends up getting A-grade.
In my time, all course work (labs, assignments) has to be submitted as a report. Highest I ever got was 8/10... mostly 7/10. In one assignment I submitted, marks were slashed for no zooming in a graph (still it covered 90% of the page). In another report, few marks were removed for not using a ruler to draw a circuit diagram. Having few bad grades eventually costed my first class, which became a major issue in my post-grad entry. Considering those days, I think college kids are having easy time now. In a way, I can understand why people in the working world pay little to no attention on college performance.
Why stop at computer grading! Its time to make the computer do all of our writing too!
In the real world picking one's battles and tailoring one's message to match the expectations of one's audience is often more important than the content itself.
I can see how in some cases the computer would do a better job than a professor. In particular, ones that could not care less about teaching. I'm in Physics, and in one grad course there was an essay on an exam that I got a zero on. When I looked at the solutions, it appeared that the essay on the key was actually my essay with a few slight modifications. Two sentences of the short paragraph were my words exactly. When I brought this to the professor (who was also my advisor), he (a) couldn't remember my name (b) wouldn't even look at the exam (c) wouldn't discuss the answer and deferred everything to his grader, who was another grad student. The grader had better things to do and just handed my exam back to me and said, "that's what you deserve." This same professor, it should be said, makes psychotic Wikipedia self-edits about how his work "reconciles quantum mechanics with the Christian faith", rarely talks to other groups about his research (once one of his students came to me to ask a question about a problem he'd been working on for months--within minutes I identified it as being identical to a well-known NP-hard problem), and frequently "dumps" RAs he doesn't like by simply ending all communication with them.
My point is, the professors and TAs that grade unfairly don't do so because they can't. They do because they don't care. When I graded essays, I had a list of things I wanted to see in a correct answer and how many points they were worth, and a list of things that I would always take off points for. Every essay had a column of numbers next to it and a copy of my rubric so that any student could see exactly what they got points for and what they may have been penalized for. Out of classes of over a hundred students, I rarely received any complaints except for students who were on the border of failing and were desperate for one or two points. While sometimes grading essays felt like a simple application of a regular expression, searching for the gems of knowledge, equally as important was the logic that led to that conclusion. Correct answers obtained through incorrect application of concepts weren't worth any points at all, and it would be difficult for a program to match that with any regular expression.
I guess experience with bad professors did teach me one thing--despite having no passion for teaching myself, I would always treat my students like people and do my best to ensure that they got the best education possible for their tuition.
I'm quite surprised that so many unis have with making the papers truly anonymous, and the grading at least as fair as the case provided by Western Governors. This is how Oxford does it: we get candidate numbers and examiners, usually a committee of senior academics, who grade the papers, can't know whose paper they're grading. The really important papers, like degree finals get double-marked. Favouritism isn't really possible, grade inflation is low, but does still happen, although in line with what the other unis are doing.
I'll admit to two caveats:
Not really useful for continuous assessment - although this is remedied by making us do assessed papers that don't count towards the degree and aren't anonymous. All the assessments that count are at the end of the year (or for many courses, at the end of 3 years), and are comprised by perhaps about 8 papers at most.
The system might be a bit more difficult to implement for US degrees, because you get to pick all your subjects, but it's by no means an impossible task.
Poe's Law relates to how parody of extremism can seem similar to actual extremism.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Dude can you SEO my essay for $20?
I think the biggest efficiency gain would be if a computer wrote the essay submissions too.
Then we could get the whole examination process down to a few milliseconds rather than the current months, or even years.
In elementary school, yes, in college, no.
I am currently getting my Masters in Information Systems with a specialty in security. I have 15 years experience in the field including senior executive and operations targeting bad actors. However, in one of my classes, the TA would give me poor grades on my essays whenever I would write about and cite from my professional experiences and research. I decided from then on to just regurgitate the material from the PowerPoints and reading material (much of which I disagreed with, or was outdated). Guess what? My grades improved drastically. The funny thing was that the TA was a lifetime student with barely any real life professional experience.
I would hope that there is far more writing in journalism and creative writing courses than the test.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I wrote a response to this, but I think Slashdot ate it.
Has anyone done good empirical work on similarities and differences in perceptions of literature, according to cross-cultural, demographic, or other factors? The greatest weaknesses I have seen in the litcrit I've been exposed to have been the lack of empiricism, the lack of taste, and the lack of ability to write well (in fact, the propensity to write quite poorly, despite the use of jargon). But perhaps my exposure has not been broad enough.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
There are plenty of times you can identify what Shakespeare is doing. You just have to keep in mind he may have been doing other thing as well, and probably was. In the Tempest, when he's mocking his audience and saying goodbye to them, is he also mocking you for thinking you know that?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I hope they still have the professor at least go over it. Otherwise you'll have students trying to game the computer by writing things that are sure to inflate the score without necessarily being proper for the essay.
Normative statements about the particular criticism, you mean, rather than normative statements about criticism itself or about schools of criticism?
Is "New Criticism" essentially the idea that all criticism is valid, kind of like a view of literary criticism through a lens of complete moral relativism, where no critique is better than another?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Grading on a curve has three purposes:
1) It does not punish people who take harder courses or courses which are graded more harshly.
2) It keeps people from failing (incredibly important when school costs as much as it does).
3) It limits grade inflation (mostly a red herring that people use to justify grading on a curve).
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
"Even in sciences and engineering, the person who can communicate their ideas clearly and persuasively in writing will have a big edge over one who has similar technical skills but can't write well."
No, rather:
Even in sciences and engineering, the person who communicates his ideas clearly will have a big handicap over someone who has similar technical skills but is willing to write incomprehensible (but presumably deep) buzzword-raddled bullshit.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
I'm alright with computer grading so long as students are given the ability to petition to have their test regraded by a human being.
The only reason to study a subject is to make contributions to it. Any decent mathematician, physicist or writer will be failed by computers or uninvolved beaurocrats because they only look for what is already known and therefore useless.
The purpose of a test is to see if you know the material that is being presented to you. If the material you are being fed looks like bullshit that's still what is required to be put in the tests and assignments.
I'd say the sarcasm was probably noticed but didn't cost any marks becuase it was used in a way that showed you were paying attention.
So? There's far more calculation in engineering courses than in the test. Saying that x is included in the course is no reason for not being included in the test -- it would be a strange course that only tested you on stuff that wasn't in the course.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"Even in sciences and engineering, the person who can communicate their ideas clearly and persuasively in writing will have a big edge over one who has similar technical skills but can't write well." No, rather: Even in sciences and engineering, the person who communicates his ideas clearly will have a big handicap over someone who has similar technical skills but is willing to write incomprehensible (but presumably deep) buzzword-raddled bullshit.
That isn't an advantage in sciences and engineering. It's a route out of sciences and engineering and into management.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
My story is kind of opposite to most posts here. In second year of university I had a particularly hard time with a key module. I clocked up hours of lab time, went to every lecture, put in a lot of work, but the module wasnt sticking. My grade for that module was ultimately terrible despite my best efforts, but where others got similar grades and werent seen to be working, my lecturer was around for a lot of the time I clocked up and he basically let me pass based on that fact.
It was the _wrong_ thing to do and I shouldnt have accepted that decision, I should have re-sat the year like many many others had (It was a tough year, the course was restructured during us going through it and failure rates were very high.) Ill always regret that decision, and I failed a third year where I was completely out of my depth. It was only on the third attempt at that third year I finally passed with a shoddy mark for the degree. I wasnt nearly so hard working by then and somewhat bitter at seeing everyone else in my old year catchup and surpass me.
There were certainly other factors to all this but when I chose to take the wrong decision no matter how well-meant it was it had a pretty dramatic effect on the rest of my education and likely the rest of my life.
This is to fight grade inflation?
1) Grade inflation happened when student evaluations started counting in the evaluations of professors. Students reward grades that are too high.
2) When this software works, all students will use it, and grading criteria will change to be about other things.
So, which computer do I have to sleep with to get an A in this paper?
I am anarch of all I survey.
The problem with computer grading of essays is that you are reaching for a predetermined standard. That's what 99% of grading is about.
But sometimes there are unexpected things and views. They may be because the pupil has not bothered getting his facts right. But they may also be because the pupil has got a new view of the facts.
Computer grading is likely to punish either. Don't get me wrong: human grading is not exactly dependible to reward innovative views either. But there is a reasonable chance of it happening.
And with modern media, there is no ultimate point in rote learning. We progress by innovation, not repetition. Of course, you can't innovate when you don't have an idea where you are standing in the first place. So a lot of learning, and computer-gradable learning, is important. But if you don't use it to go somewhere new eventually, and a computer can't judge that (and many humans won't properly judge either), there is no point in even starting.
There are many highly paid fields which could be done better by computers. Many of these are just protected by government law.
Overall, the computers can or will be able to match a highly quality person in any field. You'll always be able to find some exception where a human expert might be better, but for the mass provision of a service, computer analysis will tend to be just as good.
I don't have the link, but I recall reading a medical journal whereby a computer was able to judge within 98% (I remember this number) of the BEST radiologist in detecting breast cancer.
Now just think about that. Radiologist are some of the best paid medical professionals. We could reduce their job to a computer no different than a manufacturing worker. We'd still need to maintain some expert radiologists to keep up with programming and optimizing the machines and a few to verify odd cases, but the vast majority could be replaced by computers, reducing the cost of healthcare dramatically.
But we won't do that of course. It's a protected profession.
As we build up the power of computers, people are going to find just how 'routine' so much analysis and judgment is overrated when it comes to the provisioning of mass services.
It's the same in education. I taught high school for a few years (math and cs). You listen to the educational hyperbole that goes on and about tailoring lesson plans for students... it's all a bunch of hoopla to protect the profession.
Just think about it for a second. There are thousands upon thousand of high schools. You're not teaching anything different in your grade 9 math. You're going to get about the same distribution of different kinds of learners and behavioral problems. You should know your neighborhood and it's going to be the same story year after year.
Yet, teachers pretend they're providing value by customizing things... instead of just using premade lesson plans we could provide on mass scale and be done with it.
Now sure, we can tell the kids they are special and unique :P but from a lesson plan perspective... they're not.
We see the same thing in finance. ETFs and others have shown to work just as well... if not better... than actively managed funds. Again, you just need a few experts at the top... and then a computer to mass provision the service.
Again, I'm sure you can find the top 2% in any field that provides exceptional value beyond what a mass provisioned service can provide.
In senior year high school I had female Poli-Science teacher (who had teached in a tier college previously) that I knew was going to sink me for being the contradicting questioner. But I also knew she was susceptible to her ego. She also weighted the semester essay for most of the grade. So I stroked her ego and aced the class. My friends and I had a good laugh afterwards.
How do we decide in our society who gets to do one of the most important jobs, be a parent?
As for professional schools, see what happened 100 years ago, based on your reasoning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
"One of the consequences of Flexner's advocacy of university-based medical education was that medical education became much more expensive, putting such education out of reach of all but upper-class white males. The small "proprietary" schools Flexner condemned, which were contended to be have been based in generations-old folk traditions rather than relatively recent western science, did admit African-Americans, women, and students of limited financial means. These students usually could not afford six to eight years of university education, and were often simply denied admission to medical schools affiliated with universities. While many such doctors continued to practice, they did so under proscribed circumstances and for less pay. It also made it more difficult for people of color, residents of rural areas, and for those of limited means generally to obtain medical care in any form."
That was the kind of "folk medicine" that was destroyed 100 years ago by an emphasis on bureaucratizing medicine and focusing on profit-maximizing interventions that treats and palliates instead of holistic thinking that prevents and cures.
Thanks, but no thanks.
People need feedback, but they don't need formal bureaucratic grades, which are more about social control than honest concerned feedback.
Alternatives are things like "unschooling".
Besides, much of modern medicine is quackery:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So you spend a whole of time saying something that I already say in my original reply.
"So basically everyone can become a doctor or lawyer just by going to school. Not that I'm opposed to that... I believe most professional licenses are for protection more and quality less... and they tend to do more harm than good... but anyways."
Grades are necessary for our current society and economic model.
Get rid of grades and the rest of society has to change with it.
We're talking about eliminating tests. You implied it would be difficult to eliminate tests in journalism and creative writing courses, meaning that the only way to grade a creative writer/journalist is by giving them a test. This implies that there is no body of work generated during the journalism and creative writing courses by which such students can be graded. In other words, they don't write during the course.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Why not just make the professor or TA be blind as to which student they are grading?
I went to the University of Glasgow for graduate school and my department had a policy that all papers be submitted with your student number and not your name. TAs would grade the papers without the knowledge of who had written it. Wouldn't this take care of the grader artificially increasing or decreasing a grade for whatever reason?
What I replied to was "move away from a written test" and maybe move away from tests altogether. I never said anything about the difficulty in eliminating tests in journalism or creative writing courses. Anyway, has it occurred to you that assessing the "body of work generated during the journalism and creative writing courses" is a test?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?