Grading Software Fooled By Nonsense Essay Generator

An anonymous reader writes "A former MIT instructor and students have come up with software that can write an entire essay in less than one second; just feed it up to three keywords.The essays, though grammatically correct and structurally sound, have no coherent meaning and have proved to be graded highly by automated essay-grading software. From The Chronicle of Higher Education article: 'Critics of automated essay scoring are a small but lively band, and Mr. Perelman is perhaps the most theatrical. He has claimed to be able to guess, from across a room, the scores awarded to SAT essays, judging solely on the basis of length. (It’s a skill he happily demonstrated to a New York Times reporter in 2005.) In presentations, he likes to show how the Gettysburg Address would have scored poorly on the SAT writing test. (That test is graded by human readers, but Mr. Perelman says the rubric is so rigid, and time so short, that they may as well be robots.).'"

Comments

most schools ignore sat essay

[litehacksaur111]

I though most schools don't even care about the essay. Also the elite schools nowadays prefer the ACT and SAT II subject tests to demonstrate real knowledge. The SAT is really a dumb test, especially with all the coaching resources available now.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post tells me that you didn't score all that well on the SAT. Bad grammar, incoherent thoughts.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

The SAT only tests for rote memorization, anyway. Even the essays don't require any real critical thinking. Rote memorization != intelligence. Someone with terrible grammar can be far more intelligent than some worthless rote memorization monkey.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[InsultsByThePound]

Yanno, I don't think perfect grammar or lack of in an informal setting is a test of intelligence. Just be good enough to get the idea across.

I never sat in an English class and thought my teacher was an amazing wizard of thought through their impeccable language skills. Mostly it was "What a dull bitch." I have the same thoughts of spelling/grammar nazis online who try to use it as counterargument or to elevate themselves over the other person.

My math teachers otoh... those were wizards. Their grammar was sometimes horrible and I forgave their faults at every turn.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[AK Marc]

vocabulary = rote memorization? basic math = rote memorization? And anything learned by rote memorization is bad.

Sounds like someone who thinks he's smart who got a low score...

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[ceoyoyo]

Odd you choose math as an example, a subject where your grammar must be perfect or what you've written is nonsense.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[lgw]

basic math = rote memorization

Yup, it sure is, and sadly this is contentious. Basic numeracy is impossible without memorizing tables for addition, and multiplication. Seen a modern math textbook that shows what buttons to press on the calculator? Seen the recent "common core" controversy about quite crazy approaches to basic math that seem motivated by avoidance of memorization (it's the revenge of new math!). Sigh. But then, do they allow calculators on the SAT?

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[AK Marc]

I got an 800 on my math (old SAT, back in 1990), and I still count on my fingers. They allowed calculators (only a few approved ones), and, of course, I used it. The SAT math was about speed, efficiency, and answering the right question. Most people had a problem with the latter. I don't know all of my multiplication tables, it wasn't my thing, but seeing the question and figuring the best way to word it to find the answer was my thing. Didn't miss a question.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

vocabulary != rote memorization. I have always had poor memorization skills. However, My vocabulary has always been tested to be far above my level. Granted if you were to just present me the words with semi-random definitions I would probably be screwed. But if you see how the word is used in a sentence like most test present it to you, it is fairly easy to determine the meaning of a word from just it's grammar, context and usage. I realized this early on and was able to exploit it all through school. The thing that is rote memorization is spelling, as the English language is not phonetic despite being taught that way. And grammar has a lot of unpredictable quarks as well.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

vocabulary = rote memorization?

To a large degree, what they test for is rote memorization, yes. Vocabulary is necessary (though a large vocabulary doesn't mean someone is intelligent, and it isn't impressive), but the drill-and-kill bullshit has to stop.

basic math = rote memorization?

The way we're teaching it? Yep. Our tests certainly don't reveal whether or not someone has any true understanding of the material.

The other guy (lgw) who said that basic math is all about memorization and memorizing tables is wrong. There are low-level processes to understand. Mindless memorization and repetition should not be encouraged.

And anything learned by rote memorization is bad.

The content itself is not bad, no. But rote memorization is often a terrible way to go about it, as it almost always means that someone isn't getting an actual understanding of the material.

No one on this planet would say that no one should retain any information; then you couldn't do a damn thing. The problem is, we rely far, far, far too much on memorization, and in the end, nothing is memorized and nothing is understood. Memorization should almost never be forced, and almost never be tested for. The better teachers at the better universities have realized this.

Sounds like someone who thinks he's smart who got a low score...

Sounds like someone who is desperately trying to defend poorly-designed tests so he can feel superior to others. Can't shatter that false sense of superiority, can we? That's about as valid as what you said, and just as likely to be false.

Attacks like those don't do a damn thing. I fail to see why people are so obsessed with making random guesses about others, as if it's relevant.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds too much like butt-hurt over a low score.

Sounds like an ad hominem. Randomly attacking other people by spewing forth irrelevant guesses isn't going to make your actual arguments more powerful, you know.

1. The SAT "only tests for rote memorization"? Cite please.

If you need a citation to show that you only need rote memorization to pass the SAT, then you don't understand intelligence or education. The math problems consist of solving arbitrary problems that are essentially spelled out for you, or solving idiotic word problems which are, again, basically spelled out for you. "Oh, I have to use this formula to solve this problem!" Never, at any point, do these problems test for actual understanding (such as a deep, intuitive understanding of why it all works) of the material. If you disagree with this, I suspect you yourself do not know what it means to understand mathematics, because you'd know there is more to it than just solving repetitive problems on a poorly-designed test.

2. "Rote memorization != intelligence"? Again, cite please.

You think that rote memorization is intelligence? If all you are is a rote memorization monkey, you'd have no way to take information and actually innovate in such a way that our understanding of the universe around us increases. Einstein was intelligent; he was an innovator. Rote memorization monkeys are not intelligent, though someone with a good memory may be intelligent, but it's by far no guarantee.

But that ain't the way to bet.

There's actually no reason to think either way, as the ability to use language 'correctly' is such a low bar for beings that evolved to use language that it isn't a real sign of intelligence when compared to the intelligence of people who actually innovate and increase our understanding of the universe.

Whether you like it or not, if you get a good score on the SAT, you're smart.

Whether you like it or not, your statement is false. You have no idea what it means to be intelligent.

If you get a bad score, well, you might be smart. But the odds are you ain't.

It's also funny that you tried to make me play the citation game, yet you put forth many baseless statements like this.

The chance that a specific individual is intelligent is very low, not just if you do poorly on the SAT.

About half really are below average in any trait - some significantly so.

About half? And who cares about averages? I care about someone's overall intelligence, not how they compare to others. A grand majority of people simply aren't intelligent.

Also, I'm not going to play the pointless 'Cite sources that reach conclusions you agree with, and others will try to counter you by doing the same!' game; it's useless bullshit. All the conclusions I reached can be verified by actually looking at the SAT. If you disagree with my conclusions, chances are you don't understand what a real education is, what intelligence is (i.e. have a general grasp of what an intelligent person might be able to do), or both.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[lgw]

Wow, they sure didn't allow calculators when I took it, not very long before that. Didn't slow me down. Couldn't use a calculator in high school physics either.

I don't know all of my multiplication tables,

Well, at least innumeracy isn't new? Eesh. I mean, I can understand not memorizing log tables with the rise of calculators, but can you really not tell from a glance at the unit price what 6 of something cost?

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[mwvdlee]

6 of something is pretty easy.
Back in grade school we had to learn multiplication tables up to 20.
17 of something is a lot harder.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[AK Marc]

1.37 * 6 is beyond easy mental math for me. 1*6=6, 33*3*2=200, so 1.37 =~8. That's as close as I'd ever come to calculating 6 of something without taking out a calculator. I can calculate the trajectory of a bullet (harder than most think it) but rote memorization is not how my brain is wired. I also don't know the letter after "j" in the alphabet, but have a vocabulary in the 99+ percentile. Not having something "easy" committed to memory is unrelated to being able to do much much harder things.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[AK Marc]

Attacks like those don't do a damn thing. I fail to see why people are so obsessed with making random guesses about others, as if it's relevant.

So the views and opinions of the "other side" are irrelevant? That's a little heartless and understanding someone's viewpoint helps understand their views. That you don't understand this indicates you need more rote memorization to make you smarter.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

So the views and opinions of the "other side" are irrelevant?

No, but attacks like those aren't even relevant to the discussion. Unless you think that randomly guessing that another person did poorly on the SAT was where the discussion should head? Because I don't.

To me, it's no different than randomly spewing forth a bunch of things you think are facts. Even if they are actually true, it's irrelevant. I don't need to understand what you think my SAT score was to understand your views about rote memorization.

That you don't understand this indicates you need more rote memorization to make you smarter.

Good idea.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[InsultsByThePound]

What's funny is colloquial language is the exact opposite and yet some people treat any aberration as if it would cause a million parsing errors.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

6 of something is pretty easy.
Back in grade school we had to learn multiplication tables up to 20.
17 of something is a lot harder.

Why?
I happen to remember 17x17 is 289, but 17x17 is just (17x10=170)+ (17x7=10x7+7x7=70+49=110+9=119)
If I didn't offhand and that multiply by ten wasn't a mental shortcut I'd do 17x20=17x2x10=340-(17x3=30+21=51)=289

Or 39x39=40x40 - 40 (to get 39*40) which is (39*39+39) so -39=
40x40 -40-39=1600-79=1500+21=1521
67*67=67*60+7*67
=60*60+7*67+7*67
=3600+420+49+420+49
=4020,4440+98=4540-2=4538
The last line actually took the longest.

I wish I could have been able to do substitution in diffyQs as fluidly but that was my limit, perhaps since I knew I'd never use them for anything.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[AK Marc]

To me, it's no different than randomly spewing forth a bunch of things you think are facts. Even if they are actually true, it's irrelevant. I don't need to understand what you think my SAT score was to understand your views about rote memorization.

What are my views on rote memorization? Do you know, or were you too busy attacking me to even bother to stop and understand.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

1.37 * 6 is beyond easy mental math for me. 1*6=6, 33*3*2=200, so 1.37 =~8. That's as close as I'd ever come to calculating 6 of something without taking out a calculator.

You need to learn to multiply and divide by powers of ten then
1.37*6=
137*6/100=
600+180+42 /100=
822/100=
8.22

Also, 33*3*2=198, !=200

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[AK Marc]

Knowing how, and being able to do it aren't the same thing. When I use 33 1/3 to approximate 37, it's obvious I'm not being exact. Did you have something to add, or are you the AC stalker that just trolls me being a little more subtle and less insulting?

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[turbidostato]

"Rote memorization != intelligence [...] Someone with terrible grammar can be far more intelligent than some worthless rote memorization monkey."

"...For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it."

René Descartes "A Discourse on Method"

"Rote memorization" is what fills your mind with useful items to play with, without them, you well may possess a "vigorous mind" but you won't be able to rightly apply it.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[ericloewe]

Multiply 137 by 6 and place a decimal seperator between the third and second least significant digits.
600+180+42=822, which means 8.22.

Probably faster than getting a calculator if you're not sitting next to one (admittedly, it doesn't happen oftne these days).

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

"Basic numeracy is impossible without memorizing tables for addition, and multiplication"

Oh my god, no. Memorizing tables is just about the worst way how to teach addition and multiplication. You can learn how to add and multiply without much memorization and understanding of learned tricks/algorithms will serve you well later on when dealing with equations.

The fact that so many people equate the two horrible failure of educational system.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

I scored a 650. I didn't have a calculator, and I was covering my left eye, because I was still drunk, and seeing double.

I never prepared for the exam, never studied for my classes, and rarely did my homework, in high school.

Math isn't my strength, but in several situations, as an adult, I have outperformed most people. And you're right. It's about answering the right question.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[MaskedSlacker]

The thing that is rote memorization is spelling, as the English language is not phonetic despite being taught that way

Not really. You can tell from the phonology of a word what language it comes from and once you know that the spelling is usually pretty regular. Almost every spelling irregularity in English is a result of the word's language of origin at the time it was borrowed.

Example: Words from French follow "i before e, except after c" (niece, achieve, ceiling, receipt, etc. are all from French) Words from Anglo-saxon do not (weird, neighbor, freight, eight, etc are all from Anglo-Saxon).

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

I also don't know the letter after "j" in the alphabet,

How did you come up with your username, then?

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[ceoyoyo]

A lot of math errors are easily recognized and eliminated by a careful reader too. Grammatically incorrect math or English is often readable. It just takes more effort, shows that the writer is either sloppy or unskilled in the use of the language, and, if the former, doesn't have much resect for the reader.

Of course, people who sit in class thinking "what a boring bitch" probably have a general lack of respect for their fellow human beings.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[ultranova]

Basic numeracy is impossible without memorizing tables for addition, and multiplication.

This is, of course, rubbish. Memorising results for common operations saves time when performing them, that's all.

Seen the recent "common core" controversy about quite crazy approaches to basic math that seem motivated by avoidance of memorization (it's the revenge of new math!).

In Real Life, if you need numerical answers often, you use a calculator. It's faster and less error-prone. And if you don't need numerical answers often, you won't remember the relevant tables, since you aren't actually using them.

The sad fact is that most of the time memorization is a complete waste of time. Either you use some data, in which case you'll learn it as a natural side effect, or you don't, in which case it won't stick, no matter what you do. This is especially true if your reason to try to memorize is that you're being forced to, as is the case with math tables.

But then, do they allow calculators on the SAT?

Do they allow English, or do you have to answer in Latin? World changes. Pretending it hasn't simply makes a test irrelevant or perverts it into outright hinderance to learning.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[ultranova]

1.37 * 6 is beyond easy mental math for me. 1*6=6, 33*3*2=200, so 1.37 =~8. That's as close as I'd ever come to calculating 6 of something without taking out a calculator.

1.37*10 = 13.7
13.7 / 2 = 7-
7- + 1.37 = 8+.

The key to fast multiplication is bit shift, then add or subtract.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad grammar, incoherent thoughts.

Hello Pot! Allow me to introduce you to Kettle.

Grammar cannot be "bad," as it does not have morals. The adjective you are searching for is "poor," as in poor quality.

Your fragmentary sentence is vague and incoherent itself because you've neglected to include the subject and the verb.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[mrchaotica]

I also don't know the letter after "j" in the alphabet

I don't either, but I can start mentally singing the "Alphabet Song" at the letter J, then remember the next lyric.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[lgw]

You can use audiobooks as a crutch for functional illiteracy, but it's better to know how to read. You can use a calculator for simple arithmetic as a crutch for functional innumeracy, but it's better to have the skill of simple math in your head.

These are a couple of the most basic, simple skills in civilized society. They don't take much time and effort to learn, they're rewarding throughout life, and there's simply no excuse for not having these skills. It's just the worst kind of lazy.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[AK Marc]

How is that any easier? x*6 = ((X *10)/2)+x That's not a simplification of the problem. I just generally estimate, the only time it doesn't work is one egg for $XX and a dozen eggs for $YY and the estimation isn't granular enough to know which is cheaper per egg. It's not that I don't know XX*10+XX*2, but that the string of simple math to get a minorly complex answer is not calculable to me (and others). But calculus and discrete math is easy.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[AK Marc]

Yup, that's exactly how I do it. I was told it was a sign of dyslexia (by someone certified to make such diagnoses).

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[AK Marc]

AK is the state abbreviation for Alaska. What, is A the letter after J?

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Nephandus]

Yeah, self-righteous moralfagging clearly makes you right about technical matters. Let me guess "nice" people are smart, and "rude" people are stupid? The "nice" people get to define "nice" and "rude" because they're "nice", which makes them right because arbitrary standards written by sleaze and majoritarian idiots to control social interaction for their petty-political purposes define intellect, logic, and fact.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't either, but I can start mentally singing the "Alphabet Song" at the letter J, then remember the next lyric.

Me too. I'm still trying to figure out how to tell my brain to create an index for the Alphabet table.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

Rote memorization in the SAT was basically the topic. I do not know your full opinion of rote memorization, because you never made it clear. You instead chose to respond to the part of my post that was a response to the claim that I probably did poorly on the SAT, which I felt was irrelevant.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Anonymous Coward]

"...For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it."

You're not applying it by memorizing garbage that does not need to be memorized; you'd be applying it by innovating and discovering things that no one else before you did.

I should also note that putting forth short quotes from people of the past isn't really going to strengthen anything you say.

 

"Rote memorization" is what fills your mind with useful items to play with

No, the ability to retain some amount of information does that. Items such as books and computers are more useful for storing information, and make you waste less time on memorizing and give you more time to actually understand how and why things work.

you well may possess a "vigorous mind" but you won't be able to rightly apply it.

Baloney. Just because you've arbitrarily decided that memorizing unnecessary things is the only way to be able to apply your mind, doesn't make it so. Want to know how I apply my mind? I work on solving real problems, not memorizing information. I retain what I need to and want to, and nothing more. I solve complex problems that require plenty of logical thinking skills, and I do all of this without wasting my time memorizing whatever it is you want me to memorize. Your arbitrary standards mean nothing to me or reality.

So, while you may be memorizing multiplication tables or some other such trivial garbage, I'm working to understand how and why these processes work, strengthening my critical thinking skills, and possibly innovating.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[aestrivex]

Calculators were certainly allowed when I took the test in 2006 or 2007. I don't remember if it was a graphing calculator or a stupid calculator (TI-34 or something). Either way the TI-89 series was definitely banned.

Re:most schools ignore sat essay

[Man Eating Duck]

[...] My vocabulary has always been tested to be far above my level. Granted if you were to just present me the words with semi-random definitions I would probably be screwed. But if you see how the word is used in a sentence like most test present it to you, it is fairly easy to determine the meaning of a word from just it's grammar, context and usage. [...]

I wouldn't say that a particular word is part of your vocabulary if you can only guess its meaning from context. That's why good vocabulary tests only show you the word. According to this test my English vocabulary is estimated to be about 35000 words, probably because I have read *a lot* of English (it isn't my native language). This test only show you the words, and you have to be honest, so cheating is easy... however, I didn't.

There is also the difference between your active vocabulary (words that you would actually be able to recall and use in a sentence), and passive vocabulary (words that you know the meaning of if you see it standing alone). If you can only guess the meaning of a word from its context, it's not part of your vocabulary at all, and a test which helps you to the extent of showing it in a sentence is close to useless.

Architecture School!

[Anonymous Coward]

While they'll eventually be able to calibrate the computers to recognize the three keyword gibberish essay, it sounds like a perfect tool for writing architectural essays and presenting projects in school. Use the following three keywords - Perhaps; Palimpsest; Paradigm - and you'll be ready to design a building!

Re:Architecture School!

[Opportunist]

It sounds like the software would be perfect for writing audit reports. You hand in a phone book sized report, but all they ever read is the management summary.

But DARE to hand over just the relevant pages that you know will get read. Did you work at all, if THAT is your whole report?

Re:Architecture School!

[ewibble]

Your right you are encouraged to write long documents, but it should really be the opposite, writing is about communicating, if your document is so long that people don't bother reading it, the document has failed in its main purpose.

This standard should be applied to legal documents, such as License agreements, Insurance agreement, What your ELA is more than 100 words long, you don't expect anyone to read this do you? Agreement Invalid. If you need longer it should ensure that people understand what they are agreeing to, maybe run a 1 year course of something.

100 words yes!

Re:Architecture School!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't our tax code already written this way?

Re:Architecture School!

[n6kuy]

Yes, but they run it through spinbot.com before it becomes official regullations.

Re:Architecture School!

[Kjella]

This standard should be applied to legal documents, such as License agreements, Insurance agreement, What your ELA is more than 100 words long, you don't expect anyone to read this do you? Agreement Invalid. If you need longer it should ensure that people understand what they are agreeing to, maybe run a 1 year course of something.

You do realize that even the 3 clause BSD licence is more than double that with 220 words? And that one basically says "do what you like, but we take no responsibility" and if you have a license that actually tries to say anything like the GPL 3.0 it is 4632 words, not including the preamble or how to apply. How many years of your life would you like to waste? If anybody cared, we'd rather see the development of "standard terms and conditions" which would be several thousand words long but also widely deployed on most COTS software. They generally want my money, which means as long as I pay them and they deliver something I want to pay for nobody really cares what the contract says.

That usually takes one of two forms, either they want to terminate it because they don't like my use or I want to terminate it because they're not delivering as promised. Since they write the contract and most don't care, the contract says they can terminate you for anything, any time and they promise essentially nothing. Practically I figure that the courts will protect me if there's anything really unconscionable in the contract and if they need an excuse to terminate they'll find it and it won't be worth fighting it in court anyway so the actual legal text almost doesn't matter. A license doesn't have to be negotiated, if an author wants to tell me "it's the GPLv3 or not at all" is just the same as an EULA saying "it's these terms or not at all", both sides don't have to give anything.

Re:Architecture School!

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that even the 3 clause BSD licence is more than double that with 220 words? And that one basically says "do what you like, but we take no responsibility"

  "do what you like, but we take no responsibility"

Looks like 9 words to me.

Re:Architecture School!

[tolkienfan]

I write things for myself, which I will likely never read again. People often write things for the purpose of documenting details which will likely not, but may, be used in the future.

Irrelevant

[Ol Olsoc]

As long as Precious gets an "A', Helicopter Daddy, and Blackhawk Mommy won't try to have the school president fired for ruining Precious's permanent record.

Re:Irrelevant

[smittyoneeach]

Hey, Helicopter Daddy and Blackhawk Mommy dropped good boodle for that 'A', mister!
You can just stand down from all that meritocratic whinging right now, mister.

Re:Irrelevant

[Opportunist]

That's when I wish I had a SAM for such occasions...

Re:Irrelevant

[TheMeuge]

At least helicopter daddy and blackhawk mommy give a shit about the Precious. Or do you prefer the absent daddy and welfare mommy? People DO go overboard... but I feel like the pendulum is starting to swing entirely too far the other way.

Re:Irrelevant

[AK Marc]

It's swung so far the wrong way that in many places, aggressive parents are required to get the minimum education proscribed by law. If you don't have active parents, the school actively punishes the children. The thought is that they are already failures because of their parents, so better to get them used to failure and hope they drop out, so as not to harm the schools statistics.

Re:Irrelevant

[mrchaotica]

I feel like the pendulum is starting to swing entirely too far the other way.

What we have here is a superposition of extreme pendulum states.

(Actually, no: we simply have multiple pendulums at opposite extremes. However, calling it a "superposition" is more fun!)

Re:Irrelevant

[mrchaotica]

the minimum education proscribed by law.

Now that's an interesting choice of words...

Re:Irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

At least helicopter daddy and blackhawk mommy give a shit about the Precious. Or do you prefer the absent daddy and welfare mommy?

If I had to choose, and could not take a 3rd option? Probably absent daddy and welfare mommy. Because although the former "give a shit about the Precious", I imagine that all that coddling will result in a child unready for the real world, while the inactions of absent daddy and welfare mommy will teach the kid to be self-sufficient. But of course I could be wrong.

Now, if you had said helicopter daddy / blackhawk mommy vs alcoholic daddy / crackwhore mommy, I'd pick the helicopter/blackhawk.

Re:Irrelevant

[AK Marc]

Why? There are plenty of laws on education. Many explicitly stating minimum standards. We focus so much on meeting the minimums and proving it, that we no longer "educate".

Re:Irrelevant

[Ol Olsoc]

At least helicopter daddy and blackhawk mommy give a shit about the Precious. Or do you prefer the absent daddy and welfare mommy?

The false Dichotomy, only two options plan runs very very strong in you.

Frankly, the helicopter parent is subtly abusing their child. They will not allow their children to become adults. Having worked in a University environment, the change over the years is overwhelming and disturbing. There are a significant number of these adult children who do call a parent when they have a minor problem with a professor - or don't like a grade or even if th eprofessor doesn't want them texting in class. The parents do try to influence the grades of their children for the old extension of the High school "permanent record" canard. I've had personal experience with counselors who have a student come in with the parents, and doesn't say a word, texting friends, while the parents do all the work. In the workplace the most recent graduates haven't fared too well. They tend to either flame out, or more likely quit and move back with the parents. This is not isolated. In the college environment it is an epidemic. I get invitations to seminars monthly about dealing with these people. I don't save them or else I'd give you the cites.

http://www.facultyfocus.com/ar...

http://www.collegeview.com/art...

http://www.nextgenjournal.com/...

Well meaning, oh yes. No one would ever accuse these parents of not loving their children.

Loving their children so much that they don't allow them to grow up is never a good idea.

To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[LetterRip]

Since the essays are grading subject knowledge, and it takes subject knowledge to provide the keywords, it is fairly irrelevant if the essay happens to be structured in a manner that is nonsensical.

Demonstration of deeper understanding, if it needs to be tested, can be achieved via other types of questions.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Opportunist]

The next generation of the software will have a keyword database attached for every subject possible to ensure that every student takes different keywords (chosen randomly from the stock).

Then your grades are pretty much dependent on whether the random number generator chooses keywords that the grading software likes.

I fail to see the difference to now, to be honest, it's just way less work on the student's side.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[EmagGeek]

Did you happen to read TFA? In the TFA, it is said that the College Board does not take points off for factual errors. In fact, it says that it cares not for factual errors, because errors in fact seldom subtract from the quality of the essay being graded.

WTF, right?

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[MrBigInThePants]

Not being from the USA, every article I ever read about your education system just leaves me scratching my head.

How on earth did you guys let it get so ridiculous??

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[AK Marc]

Teachers are in unions, so the Republicans want to close all public schools. When 1/2 of your government wants to harm the children, and the other 1/2 is worried about other things more, then you get a government that makes sure that every year is the worst year for education in the US. So this year is the worst year in education in the US. Eventually, it will fail, and we'll be left with government-funded for-profit schools pushing the Coke or Baptist agenda, and no minimum education for anyone.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[lgw]

so the Republicans want to close all public schools

This right here is why the USA is fucked. People just can't speak coherently about politics any more. (And, of course, it's the teacher's unions who are forcing high-performing charter schools to close, but that's hardly part of the Dem platform, just a consequence of seeking the public sector employee vote).

Do you actually think either party has a goal other than the best schools? The disagreement is over how to achieve that, and I've never heard anyone arguing for no public schools, and more than for no private schools (but "no religious schools"? That one I hear occasionally.)

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[TubeSteak]

How on earth did you guys let it get so ridiculous??

Never underestimate the power of Intelligent Design.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much time watching USian TV telling us how awesome we are, and that we don't need to be smart we just need to b cool. This became a self fullfuling prophecy when all the chicks didn't want to date smart guys just the cool ones. So now we have an entire contry filled with idiots who thing they are really cool and better than all those other backwards counties like Malaysia, where they don't even have roads and shit.

That and the Jews

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[MrBigInThePants]

Teachers are in strong unions also here in NZ. (despite anti union legislation decimating them in the last decade)

The right wingers here (and their ex-currency trader, cheesy smiled leader) have been trying desperately to beat on them but NZ has one of the best bang for buck education systems in the world. (i.e. Our teachers are not paid that high but the performance indicators are in the top grouping.)

Just wanted to mention that for the inevitable people who will read your comments and think "unions baaaad" like some ideological zombie.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[MrBigInThePants]

The problem is that corruption, cronyism and a shite environment leads to corrupt and shite people all over in my experience.

Corruption is rot that spreads throughout - it does not care to limit itself to one species of host.

I always find it amusing when people try to blame only one source for this sort of thing.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[MrBigInThePants]

PS: And I doubt they want to CLOSE the schools. Just make sure that they are vast slums churning out ignorant and easily led livestock to be harvested for their min-wage labour....and most likely their organs....

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[AK Marc]

Do you actually think either party has a goal other than the best schools?

Yes. I honestly believe that the Republicans want to disband public education and have a merit-based entry to private schools (parent's merit, not children's), paid for with taxpayer dollars. It's "revenge" for having forced them to educate the poor for so many years.

I've never heard anyone arguing for no public schools,

I have. Charter-schools and for-profit private schools only, and they would be banned by law from having unions and could reject children from admission for arbitrary reasons (including race and religion).

I've gone to plenty of party meetings for Libertarians and Republicans, and I've seen what some people have advocated.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Kaenneth]

Both parties fear educated voters.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[AK Marc]

What's funny about unions in NZ is they aren't all that strong because a non-union worker has more protections in NZ than most union workers in the US. My wife is in PSA, and they do nothing, as far as she can tell. Joining the union allows one to vote on the collective agreement, but non union members ended up with the same contract. Slightly different termination rules, but not very different.

In the US, "unions are bad" has been given as a reason to close all schools because it's better for the children to be uneducated than indoctrinated by union workers. It's insane, I was making fun of it, not supporting it.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, then you're crazy. They want to be able to choose good schools instead of the crap that passes for public ones. I vote more money to the schools all the time but it does little good, as you can see, as it's not a money problem, it's a matter of screwed up incentives all around. And it's funny you say that, as the Republicans want to let people choose schools based on how good the school is, rather than being locked into the public schools which, again, utterly suck for the most part.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[AK Marc]

Money isn't the issue because the Republicans keep passing unfunded mandates that cost the schools money, but don't help education. There is no amount of money that the Republican's can't find a way to waste. The "cost" of public school education (in-class spending) is *below* private school cost. But we keep hearing about how public schools are so much more expensive. Why?

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, then you're crazy. They want to be able to choose good schools instead of the crap that passes for public ones. I vote more money to the schools all the time but it does little good, as you can see, as it's not a money problem, it's a matter of screwed up incentives all around. And it's funny you say that, as the Republicans want to let people choose schools based on how good the school is, rather than being locked into the public schools which, again, utterly suck for the most part.

Of course private schools are better than public schools for those few that get to go to them. I went to a "test to get in" public school and it was way better than the typical school too. Public/private is not the valid metric here. Selective Public or Private schools can both raise scores by doing nothing more than kicking out or barring entry to anyone who does worse than the state/district average. The average always goes up when you can fire the low performers. There was even a Christian Slater movie that had that as the plot element 25 years ago.

The Republican leadership has been on a long term drive to eliminate public programs in general. They've even driven the outsourcing of most of our military: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0319/A-lesson-from-Iraq-war-How-to-outsource-war-to-private-contractors
"By 2008, the US Department of Defense employed 155,826 private contractors in Iraq – and 152,275 troops. This degree of privatization is unprecedented in modern warfare."

  Social Security and public schools and being the two longer term ones, and Obama/Romneycare more recently. The wedge to do all of that is "choice". They don't say they want to end SS, they say they want to privatize it so Wall Street vultures can feed off it. I mean so individuals can invest in the market economy. Rick Perry couldn't even name the three main the departments he wanted to eliminate, but the Dep't of Education was one. School vouchers are a tax scheme to drive tax dollars out of the public system and into the private one. The chief benefactor is private school owners, who eventually get to raise tuition by $5k or whatever from the voucher as they capture that income stream from the public coffers. If you put 100% of kids in private schools, those schools will suck as badly as the public system does. If you want to kick certain kids out of school at age ten if you think they are not working out, go ahead and state the specific criteria to be used.

Ultimately it's a wedge issue that institutionalizes the social divide between haves and have nots even more than being born to wealthier parents does in the first place.

Dems are terrible, but they are, as a group, less dangerous to America than the even more hypocritical, warmongering, uterus scanning, butt blocking but somehow "small government" Republican Party. Those who own Democrats pour figurative filth onto the airwaves but Republican politician's owners pour literal filth into the actual air and water we need to live. I can reasonably choose to change the channel or turn off the TV, I can't choose to stop breathing polluted air or drinking polluted water as easily.

Yes there are problems with public school, but the proposed changes solve none of them while creating huge new problems.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I literally do think that the Republican party has a goal other than the best schools. The worse public schools do, the more ammunition they have to channel all the money into better schools for an insignificantly small minority of their own voters and the more uneducated the population becomes, making them easier to con into voting Republican.

The fact that it is politically beneficial to actually drive parts of the country into the ground is why the USA is fucked.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Uberbah]

And, of course, it's the teacher's unions who are forcing high-performing charter schools to close, but that's hardly part of the Dem platform, just a consequence of seeking the public sector employee vote

So, not just the usual worker hating, democracy hating fascism, but now with some crazy BS pulled out of right field.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

PS: And I doubt they want to CLOSE the schools. Just make sure that they are vast slums churning out ignorant and easily led livestock to be harvested for their min-wage labour....and most likely their organs....

And that would differ from the current union-controlled public school systems how?

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

And, of course, it's the teacher's unions who are forcing high-performing charter schools to close, but that's hardly part of the Dem platform, just a consequence of seeking the public sector employee vote

So, not just the usual worker hating, democracy hating fascism, but now with some crazy BS pulled out of right field.

Pulled out of right field? Umm, no.

Let me Google that for you!.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Uberbah]

Try harder.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[mrchaotica]

Do you actually think either party has a goal other than the best schools? The disagreement is over how to achieve that...

...And (perhaps) a disagreement over what "best" means. I say "perhaps" because, to at least some extent, both parties agree that "best" means something entirely different than what most parents would expect (i.e., "an obedient assembly-line worker with no critical thinking skills").

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[lgw]

No one wants an obedient assembly-line worker with no critical thinking skills any more. For nearly 100 years those were the best jobs most people could hope to get. The schools were genuinely doing people a service by training good manufacturing workers. But that ended decades ago, and critical thinking is all the rage now. The problem is inertia, and the people on both sides who want to cram kids heads full of stuff that's not particularly compatible with critical thinking (but then, the people who want that don't know this, so even they are for critical thinking now.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[hendrips]

Well, not that it's much of a defense, but absolutely no one that I know of took the SAT essay section seriously. I have not heard of any university that actually considered that section of the SAT when making admission decisions. So our education establishment wasn't completely stupid, I guess.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[ausekilis]

This and this. It's also a neverending cycle.

Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Not being from the USA, every article I ever read about your education system just leaves me scratching my head.

How on earth did you guys let it get so ridiculous??

Partly it's the difference between what you read in the paper and what is actually happening in reality. Most of the news media here is focused solely on amplifying any scandalous elements to a story.

You don't need software

[Anonymous Coward]

... because Slashdot shows that humans already make evaluations about articles without reading them.

Quid pro quo

[Opportunist]

When you're too lazy to read my essay to grade me and let software do it, I don't really see no moral problem with doing the same to write the essay.

Re: Quid pro quo

[Mr. Sketch]

> I don't really see no moral problem

I guess someone should have graded your essays a little more closely instead of relying on a robot.

Re:Quid pro quo

[Anubis IV]

As someone who graded hundreds of essays while serving as a teaching assistant for a senior-level engineering ethics course, I have to say that I find your lack of integrity rather appalling. Your moral obligation to write the essay yourself is independent of the method they use for grading it. Just because someone else is doing a lousy job does not mean that you suddenly have a license to short-change them for what you're obligated to do.

I would guess that I graded around 300-400 essays during the three semesters I served as a TA, and that I probably averaged around 20 minutes per essay, since I was a strong believer in providing useful feedback over things the students could improve, even if they weren't necessarily incorrect. That said, other TAs spent as little as a minute or two per essay, and barely provided any feedback at all. Regardless of how much time the TAs did or didn't spend on the essays, however, the students had the same obligations, and rightfully so.

Re:Quid pro quo

[number17]

Your moral obligation to write the essay yourself is independent of the method they use for grading it.

Students pay big bucks and expect to have experts in the field teach them and grade their work. It sounds like these schools are off-shoring their marking so that they can do other work (ie Research). If the school was upfront, before paying tuition, that they were going to just send your essay to Bangladesh for marking then I would be ok with having a moral obligation to write the essay myself.

Re:Quid pro quo

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it isn't. Good try though.

It also means that teachers are not reviewing the CONTENT of this work, and in so doing the schools have broken their end of the social contract implicit in school work. Expecting the students to uphold their end knowing the school isn't going to uphold its end is ridiculous.

Re:Quid pro quo

[DoofusOfDeath]

Your moral obligation to write the essay yourself is independent of the method they use for grading it.

That's an interesting claim. I'd be curious to hear you make an argument to support it.

Re:Quid pro quo

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect. In all aspects of life we are pushed to doing things in a manner that gives us the feedback that we desire. If the feedback you desire is a good grade and that grade is obtained by putting the right words in the right places regardless of their meaning then that is what people will do and if the robot gives them an 'A' for that nonsense than so be it.

The problem here is just like bad management at pretty much every company ever. The goal is not to 'do it right' or 'do a good job' as so many new workers idealistically assume. The goal is simply to make yourself look good, and/or make others look bad such that you get a bigger piece of the pie. If a company is not recognizing and rewarding people that do good work than people will do whatever the company IS rewarding.

If you have ever worked for a company that evaluates people on metrics you know that you only get what you measure.

Re:Quid pro quo

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

"I have to say that I find your lack of integrity rather appalling."

Unfortunately, engineering ethics is something that is normally taught in the undergrad level. With the onslaught of international graduate students and H1-B workers, engineering ethics become a "luggage" for competitiveness om the domestic student or workers to compete with these people who treat plagiarism as honorable activity. Any person with integrity will lose out to those who has no bottom line to achieve the goals.

Re: Quid pro quo

[Anonymous Coward]

Laziness is almost never the issue. Most instructors want to do excellent teaching. University administrators, on the other hand, want to reduce costs and increase revenue for each course, which means increasing class sizes. When hundreds or even thousands of students are registered in a course taught by just one salaried instructor, automated grading becomes nearly inevitable. Of course, the one salaried instructor has now been replaced in most cases by an overworked contract instructor making less than a basic living wage.

Re:Quid pro quo

[clifyt]

As someone that wrote software like this -- and disagreed with the subject of the story a decade ago when he tried to get us with both the Gettysburg Address as well as Kennedy's inaugural address (both of which are GREAT speeches with historical value, but shitty college entrance exams) -- you are looking at this entirely wrong.

I can give you background of how these things are generally graded. 3 people get an essay, look at it for 30 to 45 seconds, throw a score and it and if they are all within a margin of error, they move on. If not, a senior rater comes in and and they can replace one other person and it is now within margin of error, they move on as well. If not, it is workshopped for 5 minutes.

In 99% of the cases, you have less than 2 minutes of viewing on your essay between 3 people.

Enter the computer...the raters are told they are going to be rated themselves. We can throw a lot more prerated essays that had been normed by a large group of raters, and train the rater. They know they are being measured and the average rater spends two or more minutes reading through these. You actually have MORE time with eyes on your essay with a computer rater involved than you do without. Having a computer rater doesn't remove humans -- it adds a safe guard. It means one person spends more time and is verified with something that is unbiased (within reason...actually was able to figure out subtle racism and otherwise that wouldn't have been detected with purely human raters...'black' or 'hispanic' names and scores go down...'asian' names and the scores go up...give the same essay with the names switched and the humans change ratings...the computer was actually more objective).

I haven't been involved with this sort of thing in a decade, and I can only assume it is much better than when I left my project...but lazy isn't the right word. Underpaid and overworked? Yeah...but not lazy.

Re:Quid pro quo

[ruhri]

As someone who graded hundreds of essays while serving as a teaching assistant for a senior-level engineering ethics course, I have to say that I find your lack of integrity rather appalling.

As someone who served on the IEEE ethics committee I find your appeal to argumentum ab auctoritate rather appalling. You should know the distinction between ethics and morals. One could make the Utilitarianist case, in which (arguably) the behavior cited is morally OK. One could also make the Kantian argument that (arguably) comes closer to what you were condoning.

Regardless of how much time the TAs did or didn't spend on the essays, however, the students had the same obligations, and rightfully so.

As an assignment for your ethics class: please elaborate, under which ethical systems, the above statement holds true or not, and why.

Re:Quid pro quo

[KingOfBLASH]

The problem is that technology allows universities to take short cuts in education, and not in the students advantage. Add to that some of the current goings on in the university system, and the future of the education system is a little worrisome (then again the future has always been worrisome and somehow we've muddled through).

But, while before you might have a few bad apples not providing sufficient feedback to students (or not doing it in a useful way) you have, as matters of policy, short cuts.

Why pay any attention at all to your students work when:

a) You can outsource checking for plagiarism to Turnitin or another similar service
b) A computer can do grading for you automatically. Never mind that it can't tell the difference between a right answer written a different way than in the answer key and a wrong answer.
c) An adjunct professor paid less than minimum wage can handle the actual teaching duties so the university can keep more of the students tuition.

Re:Quid pro quo

[thegarbz]

Students pay big bucks and expect to have experts in the field teach them and grade their work.

What has one got to do with the other? I'd rather have a fantastic teacher from whom I learn and receive zero feedback and a token passing grade than a shithouse teacher who makes me study for the test which I pass with flying colours and was well read.

Not all effort is equal put in by both students and teachers is equally valuable.

Re:Quid pro quo

[turbidostato]

"As someone who graded hundreds of essays while serving as a teaching assistant for a senior-level engineering ethics course, I have to say that I find your lack of integrity rather appalling. Your moral obligation to write the essay yourself is independent of the method they use for grading it."

No, it isn't.

Once you failed on your end of the contract (in this case, that you will do a serious attempt to grade my intimate knowledge on the issue by using experts to review my work) you shouldn't hold any assumption on my end -Kant's categorical imperative and all that.

Given that we are talking about gradings here, since the grading is obviously not to show my knowledge, by myself and in comparation to my group, all that rests is the grade itself, so whatever that jumps up it the highest in the most effective way is the proper way to go.

In other words: you impose a tiranny but then you talk about the citizenship's moral obligation not to rebel? bollocks!

Re:Quid pro quo

[Anonymous Coward]

Students pay big bucks and expect to have experts in the field teach them and grade their work. It sounds like these schools are off-shoring their marking so that they can do other work (ie Research).

So, what - because somewhere in the chain of production there's some misleading advertising, you have license to cheat?

Does that also mean it's cool to steal a Moto-X because they advertise "made in America" while building all the parts offshore? Or an Element Electronics bigscreen? How about a Tesla: I mean, Elon Musk is selling those as "his" product, but he certainly didn't put any of the parts together.

Bottom line: someone else's dishonesty does not change your moral obligations.

Re:Quid pro quo

[supercrisp]

I want to add a data points (anecdote). I'm an English professor. For several years, I've noticed that students will keep repeating the same easily-corrected mistakes in paper after paper. I offer corrections, advice, and instruction in class. I began to suspect that students were not reading the comments. I gradually came to believe that the phones out in class were not being used for note-taking. This semester I have taught a content-heavy lecture course. Since it's new, and I'm up for tenure, and student feedback is extremely important at my institution, I decided to kiss some ass by recording lectures during which I gave test review--especially since about 50% of students show up for class. I then posted those recordings on Blackboard for my students. Despite this, the test scores stayed around 60%. Now, this is asking questions like "Which of the following was the first Gothic cathedral?" (We talked about that cathedral for a week) or "Which emperor started the construction of Constantinople's first city walls?" (Dur, Constantine?) And students were getting these wrong. So I looked at the statistics for the audio files I'd posted. Out of four audio files, one for each test, one had been listened to. Bog standard MP3, low nitrate. No technical problem. And students WERE logging in to check grades. Nope. They clearly just gave not shit one about studying. (NB: I don't entirely suck as a teacher; my students typically compliment me for making material interesting, etc, on evals.) I read a lot about how helicopter breeders and spoon-feeding teachers are destroying the minds of youth. About how phones, etc, are destroying the minds of youth. Well. I don't know. But something is. TL;DR? Short version: Fuck this. When I get tenure, I'm going to spend all day in my office reading comic books.

Re:Quid pro quo

[ultranova]

Your moral obligation to write the essay yourself is independent of the method they use for grading it.

That is highly questionable, but let's start with a simpler one: on what basis would you have such a moral obligation in the first place? Simply because someone who has power over you said so?

Regardless of how much time the TAs did or didn't spend on the essays, however, the students had the same obligations, and rightfully so.

Go on, don't leave us hanging: "rightfully so, because..."?

Re:Quid pro quo

[bmo]

Just because someone else is doing a lousy job does not mean that you suddenly have a license to short-change them for what you're obligated to do.

TAs spent as little as a minute or two per essay

Read what you just posted. Then read it again.

The only person being shortchanged in this case is the student who is actually footing the fucking bill for an education. If the education is a fraud because grading is done on whim and in a slapdash manner, which is what you are describing, then what is the fucking point for all that fucking debt and potential financial ruin?

What you describe makes "diploma mills" look positively ethical and shows how much of a scam higher-ed has become.

--
BMO

Re:Quid pro quo

[Chris Mattern]

Students pay big bucks and expect to have experts in the field teach them and grade their work.

So if I feel I'm being shortchanged, I'll just not do the work, ensuring that I don't get the education I'm paying for. That'll show 'em!

Re:Quid pro quo

[Anonymous Coward]

Your moral obligation to write the essay yourself is independent of the method they use for grading it.

Students pay big bucks and expect to have experts in the field teach them and grade their work. It sounds like these schools are off-shoring their marking so that they can do other work (ie Research). If the school was upfront, before paying tuition, that they were going to just send your essay to Bangladesh for marking then I would be ok with having a moral obligation to write the essay myself.

You sound like me when I was in undergrad. Students pay large sums of money for school. School doesn't hold up their end of the bargain. Your solution is to throw the entire experience in the trash? A more mature response would be to get what you can out of the class even if you have to take on some of the school's responsibilities. In other words, do the assignments. Otherwise the student is just throwing the money away and getting nothing in return.

Re:Quid pro quo

[NathanWoodruff]

I went to Georgia State University way back when. I was going as a CS major and I was taking a Chemistry class as an elective. I was doing horrible in Chemistry as I was a full time student and had a full time job too.

I struggled through the class and the lab. For some reason the final exam was in the computer lab. As I found out the exam was on the computer and had a time limit of 4 hours. To show how long ago it was, the exam was on commodore 64's.

It was a 200 question test and multiple choice. I struggled through the first 15 questions for almost the first hour. I decided that I was never going to finish the exam in time. I had fooled around with commodore's prior and knew the execute break sequence.

It dropped me to a command prompt and I started looking through the code to change it so no matter which answer I gave it was always correct. 10 minutes of searching through the code, I found where it matched up responses to questions. The bad news if anyone remembers programming for commodore basic is that you could lock the program memory.

The good news was that I found the variables holding the question I was on and the number of questions that I got correct. I set the next question equal to 200 and the number correct to 199.

I sat around for almost another hour. Then at the command prompt typed "run" and pressed enter. A screen popped up stating that I completed the test with one missed answer at a time of just over 2 hours.

I got an A in the class and nobody ever questioned my final exam test.....

Was that moral?

Re:Quid pro quo

[tlhIngan]

As someone who graded hundreds of essays while serving as a teaching assistant for a senior-level engineering ethics course, I have to say that I find your lack of integrity rather appalling. Your moral obligation to write the essay yourself is independent of the method they use for grading it. Just because someone else is doing a lousy job does not mean that you suddenly have a license to short-change them for what you're obligated to do.

I would guess that I graded around 300-400 essays during the three semesters I served as a TA, and that I probably averaged around 20 minutes per essay, since I was a strong believer in providing useful feedback over things the students could improve, even if they weren't necessarily incorrect. That said, other TAs spent as little as a minute or two per essay, and barely provided any feedback at all. Regardless of how much time the TAs did or didn't spend on the essays, however, the students had the same obligations, and rightfully so.

I think the real question is not integrity, but busywork. I mean, you know how many essays will have to be graded (anywhere from 10-1000, depending on the class). And one also knows how long it takes to grade an essay (probably 5-20 minutes, depending on length).

The problem because well, if you have 1000 students, then perhaps you shouldn't be giving them an essay every week that requires use of auto-graders in order to get marks. No, if it takes a couple of weeks for a gaggle of TAs to finish grading them, it means you don't give essays every week - you give them once a month at most. Because an auto-grader is just saying that you don't care enough about the assignment to bother even marking them. In which case, the sole purpose of the assignment is busywork.

That's what I object to - work for the sake of work. It may even boil down to respect - the student may have spent one to many hours on the essay, and you're basically giving them a mark based on a 2 second computer analysis. Not even bothering to read it - the student wrote the essay with the intent for it to be read by a human, and effectively, he's just getting it round-filed and a random number generated.

Especially if it's a forced-length essay - 10 pages about blah that won't be read by anyone due Friday.

Yes, it means that courses where essays are common would have to change their grading systems - though I haven't been to a class where the final exam wasn't the final determinator of your grade - fail the final you fail the course. Essays/assignments/etc., were often only worth 10% of the mark, tops (often 0% - yes, the class gave out optional homework. Though you can tell who did it and who didn't from the final exam marks).

Re:Quid pro quo

[Anubis IV]

As someone who served on the IEEE ethics committee I find your appeal to argumentum ab auctoritate rather appalling.

Fair enough. Truth be told, I was merely trying to mirror his opening statement by providing a contrast from the other side. It was not my intent to use my former position in such a manner, though I can certainly see how it comes across that way. The fault lies with me on that one. I should have been more careful.

You should know the distinction between ethics and morals.

I do, though depending on what systems we're talking about, that distinction evaporates.

As an assignment for your ethics class: please elaborate, under which ethical systems, the above statement holds true or not, and why.

I'll admit, I've always leaned quite a bit more towards deontological approaches to analyzing situations in my own life (which was evident in my statement, as you said), but the idea holds true under a variety of ethical systems, which I think is fairly evident if you'll indulge me and give it just a moment's thought (which is all I intend to spend on each idea anyway).

For instance, starting with an act utilitarianism approach, if you believe that the primary point in taking a class (i.e. the chief benefit it offers) is not merely to get a grade, but rather to learn the material, you'll doubtless agree that one of the ways that's accomplished is through practice. By failing to engage in that practice, you're undermining the purpose of the class and failing to maximize the utility it provides.

In contrast, if you believe that the point of taking a class is merely to get the grade (which is, itself, a goal that fails to maximize utility, given that it does not benefit your future career, nor the worth of your future work, as much as other goals do), I'd suggest you consider rule utilitarianism. A rule which permits cheating in this manner is clearly of lesser utility to a rule which prohibits such cheating, simply because the former rule will inevitably result in the collapse of the grading system as others follow the rule and the grades cease to hold any meaning. As such, the former rule clearly does not maximize utility and should not be followed.

Kant uses a similar argument to make clear that deception is never permissible, simply because the act of doing so contradicts its own purposes (see: categorical imperative), and what we see in a case such as the one we're talking about is that the student is inevitably misrepresenting the essay as one that they wrote themselves.

Honestly, cheating is one of the first examples a lot of the ethics classes address, simply because it's directly applicable to the students and is easily shown to be a poor idea under a number of ethical systems.

Re:Quid pro quo

[ruhri]

Excellent reply. A+. ;-)

I, of course, absolutely agree with your original statement, but I also think the GP wanted to point out the much more important ethical aspect: should we build and use machines for something that is such a profoundly human activity, i.e. the communication and exchange of ideas? Taking the Kantian approach here as you so eloquently pointed out in your post: Since I as an essay writer (and reader, FWIW) expect to communicate with humans, using machines for either or both of these tasks contradicts the very purpose of such communication, thus violating the categorical imperative.

Re:Quid pro quo

[Anubis IV]

Hah, thanks!

And I think a lot of that gets back towards the purpose of the essay. I'd suggest that we write essays for our courses, not for the purpose of communicating, but rather for the purpose of improving our communication (a subtle, but important, distinction).

If it's possible to write software that can capably analyze how skilled we are at communicating, I'd have trouble coming up with any objections to using it, given that it could successfully serve the same purpose as the human grader. That said, as I think we all know, the software we have for automated grading is nowhere close to that level yet. As such, making use of it does indeed undermine the purpose of the essay.

Even so, just because the other party is undermining it doesn't mean that I'm supposed to do the same. ;)

Long story short, I think all of us are on the same page that this software shouldn't be getting used yet, though I'm a bit saddened by the people who would use that as an excuse to misbehave.

Re:Quid pro quo

[Opportunist]

That's a very different case. You spend time grading and provide valuable feedback, that alone makes it not only a moral obligation but also means it would be in my best interest to write the essay sensibly, since I would get something out of it.

But, be honest: What is the gain for the student, or anyone for that matter, when a student writes an essay that nobody reads?

Sorry if I sound bitter, but I tend to write a LOT of audit reports that do not get read. Basically, a management summary that fills about half a page would do (a full page seems to overtax the attention span of C-levels). Still, it's imperative that you dump at least a few dozen pages of text on them.

Tell me, honestly, what purpose does it serve to produce paper that nobody reads?

Re:Quid pro quo

[Anubis IV]

Take a look through this exchange I had with someone else.

To answer your question in a word, however: practice. I go into more detail in that thread and we get into a few more ways to analyze the situation using the various ethical systems.

Re:Quid pro quo

[Opportunist]

Hmm... maybe "Teach a man chemistry and he'll have an A for the day, teach him programming and he'll have As for the rest of his life"?

Babel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else notice the article used Babel instead of babble?

Re:Babel?

[geminidomino]

Reference to (Babel, Tower Of).

The story is a biblical "explanation" of why humanity, despite ostensibly originating as a single tribe, uses multiple languages.

Re:Babel?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Reference to (Babel, Tower Of).

The story is a biblical "explanation" of why humanity, despite ostensibly originating as a single tribe, uses multiple languages.

I could be wrong, but I think it's understood primarily as an allegory regarding man sinning(?) by aspiring to accomplish what only God can.

Re:Babel?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, what the story tells us is that there are things that only God can do because He will sabotage others.

Pffft

[Anonymous Coward]

"News" sites have been doing this for ages. (Including \.)

student athlete need some like this with 60 hours

[Joe_Dragon]

student athlete need some like this with 60 hours a week playing football they don't have time for class.

Can probably "write better" too

[penguinoid]

If they're using some stupid automated grader, odds are a computer-generated essay could consistently grade higher than any humans (because it can focus on scoring without worrying about content).

The answer: essay grader graders

[TsuruchiBrian]

I don't see a problem with automated essay graders in principle. It's just that the current essay graders are no good. Once we are able to make computer software that can actually understand essays as well as a human it will be should be perfectly competent to grade an essay.

I certainly see the motivation to have a computer grade essays. Who wants to read multitudes of mediocre essays. I might rather be put in solitary confinement. I am all for the automated essay graders, but only after they can be proven to be as competent as a human.

I have no idea how to make a such a competent essay grader, but I do know how to grade an essay grader. You have a bunch of computer graders and human graders grading the same essays. If the computer graders show a more consistent performance than the humans (i.e. are the outlier less frequently), then the computer grader is better.

If a paper is scored by 4 human judges and a computer, and the humans score the paper 1, 2, 3, 4, and the computer scores the paper as a 9, then it means that according to most of the human graders, the computer was way off. Essays are inherently subjective. Are the humans right or is the computer right? Who cares it doesn't matter.

If a paper is scored by 4 human judges and a computer, and the humans score the paper 4, 5, 7, 9, and the computer scores the paper as a 6, then it means that according to every human grader, the computer did better than half the humans.

If a computer can do better than the humans even by human standards, then I think it's fair to say that a computer is good enough.

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[clifyt]

I helped design one of these essay graders a decade+ ago with Dr. Ellis 'Bo' Page (Duke and MIT).

Even then, we were as good as humans in solely grammar and mechanics and all that sorta stuff. We were rating on a 6 point scale and something like 70% of the scores were a perfect match, and 85% were within 1 point.

Given that we were using professional human raters that were trained on weekly basis and had round tables to go over controversial papers, and these were considered some of the best in the US at their job...and that if you had 3 people rate the essay, take the mean score and ask the single human to rate it...they were at around 60% a perfect match.

Again, this was not for content...most college entrance exams are looking for your writing style and nothing else. If you can write well (and my writing on this site is not representative of my professional writing), you can research your material when you aren't writing content off the cuff and actually do well.

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who does research in this area, I wanted to follow-up on your comments with a few observations, and to clear up some misconceptions.

1. There is actually a fair amount of empirical evidence at this point that these scoring systems do score as well as human graders, in the sense that the grades the assign tend to be as highly correlated with consensus grades by humans, as individual human grades are (if not more highly correlated). It's not even really a scientific question anymore as far as I'm concerned.

2. Having said that, the reason why they work as well as they do is because (as you point out) the human graders are incredibly rigid, and have very strict criteria to enforce fairness across different graders. There's many studies and investigations showing that the human graders often feel like they are giving poor grades because of the superficial criteria they have to assign (because if they don't, they will actually lower their levels of agreement and therefore increase variability due to grader). In this sense, if the human grading is superficial, why not have an algorithm or model do the grading? Similarly, if you want to complain, complain about the human grading, not the essay scoring program.

3. It's naive to think that you can't game the system regardless of scoring system. That is, regardless of whether you're using a human, or a algorithm, or a parrot or dolphin, or multiple-choice, or whatever, there will always be ways of superficially inflating your score. These people just seem to have identified the crack in the system; it will get patched, and then someone else will find a new one. That's just the nature of cheating on tests, or alternatively, of increasing your test-taking ability.

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, that's all fine and good for the average essay. The problem is that once the human graders go away the random essay generator can be designed to specifically exploit the computer grader's evaluation criteria while completely ignoring human readability.

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[TsuruchiBrian]

If it becomes the case that writing style is able to be analyzed and produced by a computer algorithm, it seems to me that having a good writing style will become like having good arithmetic skills (i.e. less importance is placed on these skills as they become trivial for machines to replicate), and ironically this ability to automatically test and reproduce skills drives those very skills into obscurity.

It seems like the skills that computers can't do yet are the only ones that it is worthwhile for humans to do.

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[Anonymous Coward]

Once we are able to make computer software that can actually understand essays

John Searle would like to have a word with you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

If this argument is correct, it would mean that computers can't "actually understand" anything, essays included.

(Not that I agree with him - personally, I think the problem with his argument is he never gets around to defining what "understanding" Chinese means beyond the ability to produce the appropriate symbols in response to a query presented in Chinese. If you were an English speaker, how exactly would you learn to speak and understand Chinese, except by forming a mapping (or translation) between English phases and Chinese phrases?)

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[Anonymous Coward]

If it becomes the case that writing style is able to be analyzed and produced by a computer algorithm, it seems to me that having a good writing style will become like having good arithmetic skills (i.e. less importance is placed on these skills as they become trivial for machines to replicate), and ironically this ability to automatically test and reproduce skills drives those very skills into obscurity.

It seems like the skills that computers can't do yet are the only ones that it is worthwhile for humans to do.

BZZT! Wrong. Thanks for playing. Writing is a means of communication -- better writing == better and more understandable communication. Arithmetic is deterministic. Expressing ideas and communicating them is not. Duh.

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[turbidostato]

"I don't see a problem with automated essay graders in principle."

I don't see a problem with automated essay creators then.

"Who wants to read multitudes of mediocre essays."

Nobody. That's why they attach a paycheck by the end of the week to that activity. If you think that's not fair, you can forego your paycheck at any time.

"If the computer graders show a more consistent performance than the humans (i.e. are the outlier less frequently), then the computer grader is better."

ON AVERAGE. It happens that it is the outstanders the ones that have more potential and you are just conciously throwing all them by the bathtub. Humans can detect outstanders, computers do not.

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[TsuruchiBrian]

BZZT! Wrong. Thanks for playing. We were specifically talking about writing style not content. Grammar is predictable which is why your word processor can help to correct you. Try reading the actual content of the post next time.

Also saying shit like "BZZT! Wrong. Thanks for playing." just makes you look like a pretentious asshole.

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[TsuruchiBrian]

Nobody. That's why they attach a paycheck by the end of the week to that activity. If you think that's not fair, you can forego your paycheck at any time.

I think you missed my point. It's also boring to calculate logarithms by hand. Before we had digital computers, skilled human computers (usually women) were paid to tediously do this work. It wasn't fair or unfair. It was a waste of human effort to do something so tedious. With the advent of computers, that human effort could be spent on much more interesting things, like programming computers to perform more tedious tasks.

ON AVERAGE. It happens that it is the outstanders the ones that have more potential and you are just conciously throwing all them by the bathtub.

If a computer can score an essay between where all the human graders scored the essay, it is the humans that are incorrectly failing to recognize the outlier as the standout.

If 4 humans score a paper 4 5 7 9, and a computer scores it a 6, and it turns out the paper is actually brilliant, it is the human graders that performed the worst, not the computer.

Humans can detect outstanders, computers do not.

Computers do what humans program them to do. If computers cannot do something that humans can do, it is just a matter of humans failing to understand how their own faculties work. All it takes is for 1 human to realize how he is doing what he is doing and then translating that into a computer program to make the program capable of the same thing.

By saying "computers can never play world class chess", what you are really saying is, "humans will never be able to understand how they themselves play world class chess"

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[TsuruchiBrian]

The problem is that once the human graders go away the random essay generator can be designed to specifically exploit the computer grader's evaluation criteria while completely ignoring human readability.

You are describing a scenario where the computer grader is not as good as the human grader. It exactly this scenario I was not talking about.

I said:

Once we are able to make computer software that can actually understand essays as well as a human it will be should be perfectly competent to grade an essay.

and...

I am all for the automated essay graders, but only after they can be proven to be as competent as a human.

In other words I am saying that when the computer is able to detect a random essay just as good as a human (i.e. it is no more exploitable than a human), then it's totally fine to use them.

Re:The answer: essay grader graders

[TsuruchiBrian]

I am quite familiar with the work of Mr. Searle. I am firmly in the camp of people who think he is absolutely wrong. In fact I have this comic strip on the wall in my office.

http://www.visuallanguagelab.c...

Works on Slashdot posts, too!

[sootman]

Artificial intelligence, while seemingly tasty on the surface, tends to be underwhelmed by insufficient fish, with regard to warrantless searches.

Re:Works on Slashdot posts, too!

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, you're right. Not enough fish has been the problem with Beta all along. With this, all our problems are solved! Thanks, sootman.

- the real honest timothy, scout's honor.

Re:Works on Slashdot posts, too!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bonus point: guess the three keywords used to seed the above post.

(My guess is: "AI", "fish sticks", "NSA")

Re:Works on Slashdot posts, too!

[mpe]

Artificial intelligence, while seemingly tasty on the surface, tends to be underwhelmed by insufficient fish, with regard to warrantless searches.

AI is HARD. Plenty of tasks which people can do easily are difficult to get machines to do, even throwing lots of processing resources at the problem.
Natural Language Processing is one of these difficult problems. With "grading essays" also being nowhere near beginner level NLP.
Quite possibly actual NLP experts would not attempt to write such software, because they understand exactly how difficult a task it is. (Similar issues apply to "Internet filtering software".)

Re:Works on Slashdot posts, too!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone w/ mod points, +1 this funny. I just pants my shit...

Oh, those things.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever I had to do one of these I just copy and pasted the question or prompt a couple dozen times or until the length was good, never failed to work.

Essay grading:Dubious in the best of circumstances

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike hard science or math problems, where the answer is either right or it isn't, essay grading is always subjective. And let's face it, the liberal arts majors who go on to become English teachers/professors aren't the brightest bulbs. They often fail to see the brilliance in an essay written by a student who's smarter then they are. If it doesn't appeal to their limited aesthetic, or fulfill all the checkboxes in some list in the Teacher's Guide, it gets a poor grade.

Obligatory Offal

[TheRealHocusLocus]

A modern Richard Guindon cartoon that best represents this Slashdot story ... an urban legend ... [1998, archived] essay on teachers' and students' increasingly virtual role in a tech society ... a mad hunt for the original 1963 New Yorker cartoon that started it all ... and an ugly mouse squeak toy.

Can you blame them?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your kid doesn't get the grades, he's working at Walmart or serving coffee. Who cares if he truly learned anything. He's gotta get in the door. And starting out a great GPA is the best way to go - I don't care what the self proclaimed hiring managers say here on Slashdot. Anyway, if I looked at their hiring practices, I'd find that they are fooling themselves.

Re:Can you blame them?

[AK Marc]

What are you talking about? I've gotten lots of good paying jobs, and nobody once looked at my grades. Except when applying for further education, and even then, they aren't important if you test well. Where have you seen where a transcript is required for a job application? Never, that's why so many CEOs get caught lying on resumes (until they post to LinkedIn and someone recognizes them and knows they didn't get what they claim and turn them in). Even the $10,000,000 a year jobs don't look at actual grades. But no, some AC claims that grades matter. So they must, even if they don't.

Re:Can you blame them?

[lgw]

Hiring by big companies for internships and recruiting for new college hires are usually filtered by GPA before any engineer or manager sees the stack or resumes. I never had a company care about my grades, but then I was never actively recruited at college age, and so my first dev job was remarkably exploitive, not one of the good ones.

Beyond one's first full-time job, I can't imagine grades ever coming up.

Re:Can you blame them?

[Jane Q. Public]

Hiring by big companies for internships and recruiting for new college hires are usually filtered by GPA before any engineer or manager sees the stack or resumes.

That's a really dumb thing to do, since in most fields the majority of the best performers were not the ones with the highest grades in school, and vice versa.

Statistically you're usually better off taking the B or A- student than the one who got a 4.0.

Re:Can you blame them?

[chihowa]

If you have enough applicants and only a few positions, you're better off taking the best performers who also got a 4.0. In the extremely competitive internships and fellowships, you can afford (stats-wise) to target only the best tail of the distribution and the outliers.

Re:Can you blame them?

[lgw]

Stupid or not, it's how the world works. You have to filter a horde of students down to a pile of resumes small enough to go through by some criteria simple enough that an HR drone can manage it, while fulfilling a bewildering array of state and local requirements for fairness in hiring.

Heck, at the bigger shops today, managers and engineers don't even get involved in the process for interns/NCGs until the interviews start - no voice in the filtering process at all. Diversity suffers, otherwise.

Re:Can you blame them?

[hendrips]

Do you actually have hard evidence for this, or is this prejudice? I'd really hate to think about going through the hiring process for an employer who looked down on me because I did too well in school.

Re:Can you blame them?

[Jane Q. Public]

If you have enough applicants and only a few positions, you're better off taking the best performers who also got a 4.0. In the extremely competitive internships and fellowships, you can afford (stats-wise) to target only the best tail of the distribution and the outliers.

You missed the point.

You don't know who the best performers are, in advance. (Remember the context here is taking people right out of school.) You only know what the grades are.

Statistically, those who got 4.0 are not the best performers in later life. Some may be, but most of them aren't. And you don't know which ones those are.

A smart employer will hire the people who give him the best statistical chances of getting the best performers. That means hiring the A- and B students.

Re:Can you blame them?

[Jane Q. Public]

Do you actually have hard evidence for this, or is this prejudice?

I don't have a citation on hand, but I have read past studies on this.

I just did a quick Google search and didn't find it... but that's simple because everything I searched for was drowned out by references to "predictors of academic performance" rather than academic performance as a predictor. But even where an article is about the latter, it doesn't necessarily refer to what I was saying about 4.0 students.

In any case, I will summarize:

First, there is in general a strong correlation between adolescent academic performance and later lifetime achievement. But there are 2 things to note about this: (A) that applies to adolescence, not post-secondary school, and (B) the general correlation does not necessarily hold at the extremes.

A number of studies have shown that 4.0 students often do not perform as well later in life as others who got good, but not quite stellar, grades. The reasons for this are not entirely clear.

Just as, for example, those of genius IQ do not necessarily achieve greatness. Nobody is entirely sure why. Some might be inept socially. Some might have little but contempt for the "stupid" people around them. Who knows?

Re:Can you blame them?

[Ol Olsoc]

If you have enough applicants and only a few positions, you're better off taking the best performers who also got a 4.0.

There is one thing and one thing only that does. Screens for the person who takes tests. If I was hiring person to take tests, I'd only hire those with 4.0 averages.

Re:Can you blame them?

[chihowa]

You're clearly missing my point.

You're not going to exclude the 4.0ers and then randomly select from what's left, right? So apply your selection criteria to the smaller set of people with 4.0 and see if anyone makes it. When you have thousands or tens of thousands of people applying for a single fellowship, statistics say you are very likely to find someone who is awesome at everything. Why would you pass them up just because they don't fall in the center of the distribution?

These extremely competitive internships and fellowships will look for actual indicators of performance in addition to grades. The two need not be mutually exclusive.

Re:Can you blame them?

[chihowa]

You can't conceive of a person who's good a taking tests and also good at other things? How would a demonstrated ability in more than one area possibly count against an applicant?

Nobody is suggesting making the choice solely on grades. I mean, I specifically said that in the sentence you quoted.

Re:Can you blame them?

[Ol Olsoc]

You can't conceive of a person who's good a taking tests and also good at other things?

Sure, anything is possible. But I've seen too many professional test takers in my life to do anything but be suspicious when seeing those 4.0 averages.

It is not dissimilar to talent. Without some drive, talent is worse than useless. One of the most talented people I ever had work for me was also one of the laziest. Give him a task, and the first things he did was anything but the task. He'd go get a soda, then he would sniff around some of the staff assistants he wanted to lay. Then he might get a snack. I covered for so many of his missed deadlines that I got in trouble for covering his "going to be missed" deadlines.

But yeah, he was really talented. Fired his ass. His talent got him a lot of jobs he was fired for after a year or so.

While we might want to say the old chestnut "All other things being equal" - yeah, but all things are not often equal.

Re:Can you blame them?

[Jane Q. Public]

You're not going to exclude the 4.0ers and then randomly select from what's left, right?

I see. Yes, I misunderstood you.

Let me put it in Engineering terms...

[Anonymous Coward]

If I've been hired to build a Potemkin village, then it would be unethical of me to spend time constructing interiors for the buildings.

The English department has some nice courses on compositional writing where I can get real feedback on my progress on those skills. As far as the machine-graded essays for any other Department -- either I understood the topic before writing the essay or I didn't and if I didn't then a no-feedback essay isn't going to fix the problem.

Re:Let me put it in Engineering terms...

[KingOfBLASH]

If I've been hired to build a Potemkin village, then it would be unethical of me to spend time constructing interiors for the buildings.

Not unethical, idiotic.

Auto Comment

[vortex2.71]

This and all of my slashdot comments were generated by an automated commenter and I always get modded up!

Re:Auto Comment

[chrism238]

Well, not this time buddy!

Re:Auto Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing one or two commas. Or is this just to trick me into believing you are a real person!?

Re:Auto Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

I woulda probably gone with

"This, and all of my Slashdot comments, were generated by an automated commenter. And I always get modded up!"

so two commas, a period, and a capital S. You almost fooled me, realistic computer text

Re:Auto Comment

[Gibgezr]

My automated modding bot categorizes you as "troll", so there!

I have heard the machines singing...

[Nova Express]

Each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me....

Re:Essay grading:Dubious in the best of circumstan

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike hard science or math problems, where the answer is either right or it isn't, essay grading is always subjective. And let's face it, the liberal arts majors who go on to become English teachers/professors aren't the brightest bulbs. They often fail to see the brilliance in an essay written by a student who's smarter then they are. If it doesn't appeal to their limited aesthetic, or fulfill all the checkboxes in some list in the Teacher's Guide, it gets a poor grade.

Still bitter about your poor grades in English, eh?

Is the essay generation software available?

[mark-t]

[nt]

Re:Is the essay generation software available?

[bobjr94]

I have checked a bunch of websites and some searching and found no link to this babel generator or even a small excerpt from the submitted paper. I would have expected at least one if not both to be easily found.

This would explain...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bennett Haselton!

"The essays, though grammatically correct and structurally sound, have no coherent meaning"

Looks like many comments on political forums

[Animats]

Example from article: "Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent.". There are too many comments on news sites which read like that.

Re:Looks like many comments on political forums

[Anonymous Coward]

That is largely from character flaws and drug problems. If your speech can't be parsed, it makes poor propaganda. (you could argue that it is simply bypassing filters/mods while drowning out true discussion, but "people be crazy" seems like the more obvious explanation)

Re:Quid pro quo ...Your moral obligation...

[Anonymous Coward]

The "rules" are the rules, be they right or be they wrong.

The objection you raise seems formally to be against the poster's ETHICS (... recognized rules of conduct...) rather than
"morality" (...according to an individuals' ideals and principles. ) http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethics_vs_Morals

You have no particular charter to decide what someone else's 'moral obligations' might be. I find this apparent presumption ...rather appalling.

(This is intended to be NOT sarcastic:) The above aside, as a please accept sincere appreciation for your effort to provide useful feedback to students.

BS is the key to a BA or BS

[Anonymous Coward]

But, shockingly, intelligent students can just write any old random bullshit and get an equally good or better score. (the "bullshit" part might prove the article's point, except of course human-written bullshit works on people and auto-grading software)

Anonymous exams

[emilv]

Racism, sexism and other discrimination is quite effectively countered with anonymous grading. My university gave you a unique number before each exam and you put only that number on the sheets. Only afterwards did the administrators (not anyone involved in the course) look up and file the exam under your name. I found this helpful as a TA too because we really wanted to be fair both in grades and comments.

You can still be biased by the handwriting but we tried to counter that ourselves. If someone in my TA group recognized the handwriting of someone they knew we made sure to let someone else in the group grade that exam.

One human and a computer

[emilv]

The solution might be to have a human sanity filter checking semantics and throwing out gibberish, and a computer grader doing the fair grading.

Automated essay-grading software is a conspiracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Automated essay-grading software is a conspiracy to allow high grades to stupid niggers who almost always write nonsense essays (if any at all). Mean white people will be getting low marks even if they essays are good. But you cannot argue a fair machine grading, can you? Everything is done to 'fight racism' and 'celebrate diversity', only to actually commit white genocide by reducing white population to below 20% in white countries. This is all anti-white racism.
You can now start your hating of what I wrote. Just remember you were informed. You could have stopped it.

Re:Automated essay-grading software is a conspirac

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful, but mindless anti-racist zombies will vote for Flamebait and -1.

MIT Essay Generator Leak Detected

[retroworks]

Finally we know where some of these Slashdot articles are generated!

Re:student athlete need some like this with 60 hou

[Anonymous Coward]

They maybe its time they weren't taking an academic place some else could use and colleges had separate dedicated football academies.

Relative wealth.

[Anonymous Coward]

The right wingers here (and their ex-currency trader, cheesy smiled leader) have been trying desperately to beat on them but NZ has one of the best bang for buck education systems in the world. (i.e. Our teachers are not paid that high but the performance indicators are in the top grouping.)

The key here is to realise that "best bang for buck education system in the world" is not all that impressive. Quite possibly, the education system is good despite the teacher's unions. Perhaps unions are not so powerful in NZ as they are elsewhere. Perhaps further neutering the unions and privatising education would improve the education system.

Quick! Where's the German version?

[Qbertino]

Quick! Where's the German version? I need to boost my sociology grades!

Seriously, the first thing you have to thouroughly disable when doing sociology is your brain and any sense of logic or common sense in it. The bizar bullshit that is put out in this field even at academic level is mindboggling. The blatant non-sense that's in the books and readers of this subject is unbelievable. ... I need that generator to keep my braincells from killing themselves to end the agony.

Yep I'd be all for getting rid of public schools

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no education happening there anyway. Most of the kids don't want to be there. Out of 10 kids you might have one that actually wants to learn. Most of the teachers don't want to be there. Why would anyone want to do a job everyone takes for granted, and get spit on in the process? No respect on any side be it teachers or students. Administration is more focused on how to stay out of court, and get funding for next year than they are on the educational process. It sucks for all parties involved (most of all the American taxpayer). Half the graduating students still can't even read at a third grade level. The "poor" coming out of these institiutions are still going to be poor because they didn't bother to learn anything while they were there. It's not revenge. It's called placing finite resources where they provide the most benefit instead of the least. I understand the premise of educating everybody. What actually happens though doesn't quite line up with that utopian ideal.

Re:Yep I'd be all for getting rid of public school

[AK Marc]

What they teach is the White Man lecturing the Black Man on what he "should" know. At least in the worst of the schools which is what you describe. The magnet schools are doing great. My nephews *love* to go to school. Learning Russian as a 3rd grader is fun and exciting. The program also helped organize a US-Russian hockey game with the Russian students, so they got to practice Russian in Russia. No idea how they did in the tournament.

But back to the worst performing, there is no trust by the parents of the teachers, school, or administrators. Probably because they don't have the student's best interests at heart (certainly not the adminstrators).

I think that the issue is that racists tried to make the schools for blacks worse (As they did explicitly under segregation, now done by targeting "poor" schools), and that betrayal has never been addressed. You can't teach someone that hates you.

If we simply ended truancy and mandatory jail/school, it would probably help. That and make them open for all ages at any time, with expanded night, advanced, and non-traditional classes. Need to work for a few years to support the family at age 14? Fine. Come back any time. Want to take a year off at age 12 to find yourself? Sure, so long as your parents give permission. The jail-like-ness of it prevents education. Especially when teachers can't expel students, and police are on site. It's as close to prison/slavery as we get in our society anywhere.

The problem is whenever we loosen the grip on students, they make poor choices for themselves, when they are legally incapable of making choices. So the question is, do we let uneducated adults in the world, and if so, what do we do when they can't care for themselves? Do we let people die in squalor? Or are we more "civilized" than that? I've never seen a school-lostening plan that didn't (implicitly or explicitly) sentence millions to a horrible death. How would your system handle those who make poor choices for themselves?

grading software?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not see one place in the article that said what grading software they were using.

I can believe this

[NotSoHeavyD3]

I took a class to help me with the MCAT. In the class they gave a bunch of examples of good "writing" for the essay portion. To me it seemed as though the real trick was just mention Martin Luther King or Gandhi as your counter example and you were pretty much guaranteed at least a 4 but you'd probably get a 5 or 6 even if you didn't follow the 3 requirements. (Supposedly if you didn't do the 3 requirements the most you should have been able to get was a 2. A 3 was supposed to be almost automatic if you did the requirements and 4 was good.) Suffice it to say in theory that scoring is what should have happened, in practice pretty much do that and get a good grade even if you didn't do the requirements.