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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.).'"
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.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
Sounds too much like butt-hurt over a low score.
1. The SAT "only tests for rote memorization"? Cite please.
2. "Rote memorization != intelligence"? Again, cite please.
3. "Someone with terrible grammar can be far more intelligent than some worthless rote memorization monkey." And a random schmuck off the street can be a better shot with a basketball than an NBA player, or drive a golf ball farther and more accurately than a PGA tour pro golfer. "Can be"? Sure. But that ain't the way to bet.
Whether you like it or not, if you get a good score on the SAT, you're smart.
If you get a bad score, well, you might be smart. But the odds are you ain't.
Sorry. The real world ain't Lake Woebegone. About half really are below average in any trait - some significantly so.