Automated System Developed To Grade Student Essays

RougeFemme points out this story at the Times about software that can be used to grade student essays and offer almost instant feedback. "Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the 'send' button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade. EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks."

Comments

Have a computer write your submission too

[hawguy]

Seems like it's a small step from this to having computer algorithms that automatically write your paper for you too - then you can let it go through thousands of submit-edit-submit cycles until the scoring computer gives you a perfect score.

Kind of like the guys that came up with software to generate nonsense scientific papers and actually had a few accepted at conferences and journals.

Re:AI has not come far enough for this

[dgatwood]

Computers suck at even the most basic grammar checking. I once decided to try a bunch of online grammar checkers to see if they would be useful at providing a sanity check for my novels. I concluded that they report so many bogus mistakes that it simply wasn't practical to use their output at all. To test them, I fed them a block of content, some with intentional errors that the grammar checker should have caught, others with deliberately (or accidentally) tricky bits that should not have produced any errors.

• Upon seeing that, Joseph resolved to stop. Several grammar checkers thought "seeing that" was used idiomatically, and suggested replacing it with because. Upon because, Joseph resolved to stop. Yes. Much better.... Oh, and some others suggested that "Upon" is archaic.
• “Time to impact: seventy-six hours, fifteen minutes, twelve seconds,” the computer intoned. Oddly, several checkers suggested that "twelve seconds" was a fraction and should be hyphenated. Ugh.
• It's simple, really. There must be some mistake. Several spell checkers suggested "their". Others said that "must be" is passive voice. Uh, no, not every use of "to be" is passive construction.
• This isn’t your class anymore. Some checkers reported an agreement problem with "class". Huh?
• The room was dark, its plant-covered landscape shimmering green in the light of their headlamps. At least one checker suggested replacing "in the light of" with "considering". Eek!
• Joseph climbed up first. Several spell checkers suggested that "climbed up" is redundant. Apparently, their editors have never climbed down something.
• One checker even called "chided" archaic, but did not comment on the highly offensive swear word that I placed elsewhere in the sentence.

And so on. Heck, my phone doesn't even know the difference between "its" and "it's" and tries to auto-correct me into looking like I failed first grade English. And these folks expect me to believe that computers can feasibly help students learn to write better papers? Give me a break. Maybe in thirty to fifty years (*) we'll get there, but....

* Which many grammar checkers would probably suggest changing to "thirty-two fifty".

Re:This is horrid

[Anonymous Coward]

I went through the same system and it taught me all sorts of useful things unrelated to my actual physics curriculum, like
1/2 != 2/4
0.5 != 1/2
x != x+1-1
x^2 != x*x