How Good Are Robo-Graders?

stoolpigeon writes "With a large study showing software grades essays as well as humans, but much faster, it might seem that soon humans will be completely out of the loop when it comes to evaluating standardized tests. But Les Perelman, a writing teacher at MIT, has shown the limits of algorithms used for grading with an essay that got a top score from an automated system but contained no relevant information and many inaccuracies. Mr. Perelman outlined his approach for the NY Times after he was given a month to analyze E-Rater, one of the software packages that grades essays."

Comments

This isn't robo-grader specific...

[digitalsolo]

This problem is not specific to robo-graders. I made a solid rule of finding topics that I found interesting -and- were highly unlikely to be areas of specialty for the teacher/professor/TA grading the paper. It took slightly more effort to find the "right" topics, but it more than paid off in the long run, since the likelihood of the average test grader spending days researching every 10+ page paper they are grading is pretty low.

Obviously as your volume of large papers and required topics narrows this becomes less effective, but it's quite a good system in high school through most of undergrad studies. I guess I assumed most people did this. FWIW, I did write pretty good papers, they weren't full of B.S. (well, just average volumes of B.S.) but by getting the topic as far "out" as possible, it helped minimize criticism outside of the basic structure, citation, etc.