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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."
The best English professor I had in college would arrange to have every student come in to her office after papers had been turned in, reading each paper in the presence of the student who had written it and discussing it in depth while grading it.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The best English teacher I had was my English instructor my first year of undergrad. Instead of concentrating on whether we were writing our papers to the curriculum and/or her own beliefs about the content, she was instead interested in developing our English skills.
I went from a C student in English to an A student. I never considered myself to have any ability to write, thankfully because someone took the time to actually think critically about my work instead of comparing it to their own preconceived notions I excelled and went on to complete a research and writing focused program. This degree later fed into my graduate degree which was also research and writing focused.
If this automated grading setup can provide students with clear expectations and explanations of the mechanics of their work while avoiding personal content expectations, I really do think it'll match the claims and help to foster a positive writing environment for many.
If I knew that a machine gets to grade my work I would feel like my time and efforts are worth so little that humans can't be bothered to read it. It defeats the purpose of even writing the thing.
When you write something you are trying to convey an idea. Knowing that the machine doesn't give a fsck proves my efforts are useless.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
This is one area where automatic grading will cause massive skill decrease, as no auto-grader can actually assess contents.
There was a guy who was doing Latent Semantic Analysis on papers in order to grade them. The program would parse out the collection of words and assign a form of "meaning" to the words, and see if those "meanings" matched up with the reference "meanings" from another paper. This would show that the writer actually understood the terms correct, and used the appropriately in relation to the other words.
They did attempt to cheat the system and actually found that if one were extremely well versed on the topic of the essay, one could write gibberish that the grader would give good grades to. However, the level of knowledge of the subject necessary to cheat turned out to be greater than the knowledge of the subject necessary to write a good essay... so they suggested that the easiest way to cheat the system was to "know the subject, and write a good essay".
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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