Bringing Auto-Graders To Student Essays

fishmike writes with this excerpt from a Reuters report: "American high school students are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots. Or, more accurately, robo-readers — computers programmed to scan student essays and spit out a grade. The theory is that teachers would assign more writing if they didn't have to read it. And the more writing students do, the better at it they'll become — even if the primary audience for their prose is a string of algorithms. ... Take, for instance, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a web-based tool marketed by Pearson Education, Inc. Within seconds, it can analyze an essay for spelling, grammar, organization and other traits and prompt students to make revisions. The program scans for key words and analyzes semantic patterns, and Pearson boasts it 'can "understand" the meaning of text much the same as a human reader.' Jehn, the Harvard writing instructor, isn't so sure. He argues that the best way to teach good writing is to help students wrestle with ideas; misspellings and syntax errors in early drafts should be ignored in favor of talking through the thesis."

Comments

Re:Why not fewer students and more face-to-face ti

[bmo]

It seems to me that the way English classes are normally taught, they have nothing to do with English at all.

You have found the hidden meaning behind English classes.

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BMO

Re:Why not fewer students and more face-to-face ti

[Omestes]

If they had things that did that when I was in college, I probably would have spent most of my time trying to come up with syntactically correct nonsense.