Firstly, I think you overestimate the school's mission. I can't give you the kind of individual service and quality education you want while still grading all of those papers.
From a high school perspective:
I will see about 150 kids over the course of 300 minutes of teaching time. That means your kid gets two minutes with me every day. This is not going to change -- it was this bad even when schools didn't suck. Now, I have several ways I can spend those two minutes. I can teach. I can oversee independent and groups work. I can grade papers. If you want me to do "C" then fine. Your kids loses out. But don't expect me to take 150 essays and grade them. Your kid gets multiple choice and true/false until the cows come home. I don't care how much we've been taught to write our multiple choice questions "upward" -- your kid isn't going to truly get an experience thinking in a "higher order".
Take the work home, you say? Oh, we'll certainly do that. We'll work at home for hours grading papers, ignoring our own families, our own kids wondering why the kids in our classes are more important than them.
As I noted in another defense of my original parent, the changes don't have to be chargable, at least not to the software supplier. There's no reason text-based rule filtering can't be employed as a part of the process, just like when we filter spam. Education on the software itself can be a part of ongoing technology seminars sponsored by the school district. If, by some chance, your district doesn't make an effort to keep its teachers apprised of new technology, it's got bigger problems than how it's grading its papers.
I also don't see peers as being an issue. Each teacher can have his or her own set of profiles for his or her own assignments. If you want to consult a peer for a second opinion, great; but that person doesn't write your grading structure.
On rating hard-working non-exceptional students against less gifted slackers: it sounds to be like you're looking to assign bonus points based on effort. I absolutely refuse to employ that. If the two papers are of the same quality, I want them to get the same grade, regardless of the effort put forth. Again, that's asking for a lawsuit, and don't claim that I'm simply taking a defensive stance -- that's an offensive one as well, because I'd sue in a second if my kid earned a lower grade on a paper due to "effort".
Now, if you want a separate, general "participation" grade to be added into the final grade of the period, that's acceptable (though I'm not big on that either). But I'm not inclined to change the grade of a paper based on who wrote it.
I'm going to expound on what I said to the first person who responded to my original post. You can catch a lot of what I leave out here, there.
First, I would never, never assign even 75% of an essay's weight to grammar and style in a high school or college environment. What that means is that a gramatically correct paper that talks about chocolate bunnies instead of the assigned topic would get a mid-range "C" on a 10-point scale. That you (or anyone) would be willing to award that much on grammar scares me. Standards like that are how GW graduated from the Ivy League with C's.
You're right that it's not about regurgitating sources. It's about successfully drawing inferences, conclusions, and judgements, making comparisons and contrasts, from the facts given you. But those ideas aren't original, as much as you'd like to think. Most of the time, she was expecting it. The teacher / professor has already written those essays, from several different perspectives. Your points aren't being earned from, "oh, that's new" but from "oh, that's on the list" Sorry to burst your bubble.
Your paper will rarely, rarely contain original ideas. Your crucial details can be reduced to an algorithm. Your wild tangent can certainly be quantified, translated into a "fluff factor" that can be expressed as a percentage of the overall length of your paper. Why? Because others before you have taken the wild tangent, and the program has been trained well enough to spot it.
I don't just imply that not using those mathematically reduceable rules is arbitrary. I'm saying outright that if the teacher doesn't have those rules in place, she's probably going to fail her peer review, and then tenure won't mean jack.
Now, on the off-chance that you have an original idea that the software doesn't catch, that's what appeal of your grade is for. It should be encouraged, and in fact it should be a right of the student, especially when the teacher isn't actually the one providing the mark.
Finally, let's do an analogy. Rules can't decide whether ideas are valid / interesting / original, you say. Last I checked, that's what we uwsed bayesian filtering for right now. We separate the meaningful text from the useless, and over time, and with training, the filter improves to near perfect, with speed and accuracy better than any human. There are false positives, but that's when the human intervenes. Same basic concept.
Keep in mind that this is all for a standarized essay, an assigned topic. This would, of course, be unacceptable for a paper where the student chose his own topic. But that's not what we're talking about here.
I'm going to expound on what I said to the first person who responded to my original post. You can catch a lot of what I leave out here, there.
First, I would never, never assign even 75% of an essay's weight to grammar and style in a high school or college environment. What that means is that a gramatically correct paper that talks about chocolate bunnies instead of the assigned topic would get a mid-range "C" on a 10-point scale. That you (or anyone) would be willing to award that much on grammar scares me. Standards like that are how GW graduated from the Ivy League with C's.
You're right that it's not about regurgitating sources. It's about successfully drawing inferences, conclusions, and judgements, making comparisons and contrasts, from the facts given you. But those ideas aren't original, as much as you'd like to think. Most of the time, she was expecting it. The teacher / professor has already written those essays, from several different perspectives. Your points aren't being earned from, "oh, that's new" but from "oh, that's on the list" Sorry to burst your bubble.
Your paper will rarely, rarely contain original ideas. Your crucial details can be reduced to an algorithm. Your wild tangent can certainly be quantified, translated into a "fluff factor" that can be expressed as a percentage of the overall length of your paper. Why? Because others before you have taken the wild tangent, and the program has been trained well enough to spot it.
I don't just imply that not using those mathematically reduceable rules is arbitrary. I'm saying outright that if the teacher doesn't have those rules in place, she's probably going to fail her peer review, and then tenure won't mean jack.
Now, on the off-chance that you have an original idea that the software doesn't catch, that's what appeal of your grade is for. It should be encouraged, and in fact it should be a right of the student, especially when the teacher isn't actually the one providing the mark.
Finally, let's do an analogy. Rules can't decide whether ideas are valid / interesting / original, you say. Last I checked, that's what we uwsed bayesian filtering for right now. We separate the meaningful text from the useless, and over time, and with training, the filter improves to near perfect, with speed and accuracy better than any human. There are false positives, but that's when the human intervenes. Same basic concept.
Keep in mind that this is all for a standarized essay, an assigned topic. This would, of course, be unacceptable for a paper where the student chose his own topic. But that's not what we're talking about here.
Sigh, a troll, a flamebait, and a human taco walk into a bar...
Ok, let's address this anyway, even though you don't deserve it by your conduct. Teachers are not allowed, by professional standards, to assign grades to essays based on which ones he or she likes. It sounds insane to the outside world, I know, but it's also a good way to protect from a lawsuit (coverage is not usually a benefit of employment -- for me it's going to be about $300 next year for $1M indemnity)
Think about this for a minute. Two kids write papers. One gets a "B" and the other gets a "C". They cover the same material in their writings, and make a roughly equal number of errors gramatically. The difference: the teacher likes one paper more. What happens? Lawsuit. Don't say it won't happen. It does, every damn day.
A high school essay is not about writing "interesting". There are creative writing assignments, and in those it should be more of a factor. But the essay (ideally) is about demonstrating that you are able to take the facts given you and translate those into stances, conclusions, or judgements via higher-order thinking.
An experienced teacher will have most contengencies for these stances established and fleshed out in the form of rubrics. She's essentially already written your essay, and your friend's essay, and the essay of that geeky chick with the braces behind you. That "unique" perspective you have on Napoleon and his complex about his height? It's already been planned for.
If (and this is admittedly a critical and not guaranteed if) the skills of the teacher's rubric writing can be translated into programming algorithms for essay checking, there's no reason why a teacher's workload can't be greatly lessened, and his or her examination of papers lessened to challenges from students (which should be encouraged within reason, as this can demonstrate the same higher-order thinking sought in a well-constructed essay question.)
Now will the program miss things? Yes. But if the teacher is professional, and the student has the will to defend his or her stance, the "error" will be corrected, and the new data will be, barring beauacracy, factored into the next iteration of the algorithm.
btw: I don't need a program to tell the difference between who's and whose. Fortunately, it'll catch that for me, too.
I have been trolled, poorly. I've having a very nice day, though.
Lemme let you guys in on a little secret. If you ever take an educational standards and measurement class, one of the things you'll learn about is the construction and grading of essay questions. This includes writing out objective standards for grading beforehand, possibly even designing a rubric explaining exactly what it takes to earn points.
There is no "humanity" in a modern constructed essay. There are certainly going to be "judgement calls" when standards are not as fully fleshed out for the computer as they should be, but as long as those are appealable, I have no problem having a computer assign me the other 95% of my essay points. The only instructors who will fear this are those who like to assign grades arbitrarily. And I don't feel too sympathetic toward those people.
Well, the big reason he was taking his sweet time was that the federal prosecutor sealed the charges. When you see sealed charges today, you know that's the thing that goes hand-in-hand with being disappeared and threatened with charges of terrorism if you don't plead guilty.
Sorry, but I don't think I'd do anything different in those circumstances.
A Peter Principle Postulate:
If President of the United States is the highest position a person can hold in this country, and people always rise to the level of their incompetence, does this mean we have never had a competent President?
How do you put a company in jail? That's easy. You clean out the Board of Directors, appoint a special master, and put the company in receivership for the length of the sentence. If a company commits a crime that gets it 3 years, then it spends three years being run by outside people. If it gets the death penalty, then it's dissolved and its various components are sold to the highest bidder.
I disagree. You noted that over time we can crouch with a keyboard as well as we do in real life. This is primarily for those of us who play games a lot and develop a standard interface we use across all games of a genre. I mean, when you play an FPS that allows for remapping, you almost always use the same key across each game for a given function, right?
So to me, a clean consistent mapping that can in general be agreed upon is what will make things easier. After all, how would you do driving someone else's car if they used something other than a steering wheel for controls?
We're getting sent the worm every couple of minutes. First from one source, then a second. Really pissing me off. Tracking it down has convinced me that it's a relative of the boss's wife who's a primary source for us, but noone will return my f*cking messages so I can't get this crap brought down.
Hey, I'm staying on the clock until they call me back. Damaging or not, this is gonna be one expensive worm.
Lemme get this straight. They got the Viola dude on the stand, and the judge made a finding of law (not of fact, because that's not his job) that his testimony was immaterial.
Someone PLEASE tell me where I can get a transcript of this?
(and tell Granny to get out while the getting's good)
Web designers (at least those who do more than just muck about in Frontpage) have experience in developing the user interfaces that are part of websites. We've seen 100 different ways of conducting logins, and we're familiar with what works and what doesn't. We often CAN log in with our eyes closed.
When we say that you could have done a better job on your site, it's usually because you could have.
Except that the U.S.'s stance on the Taliban was that it was not the rightful government of Afghanistan. Therefore, Hawash did not violate his oath if he aided them.
A "purchased" CD has two components, the physical media and a license. My question is, how much of that $12 goes to the media, and how much to the license?
But to what part of these are the costs attributed. Since the physical media has a retail value of pennies, if that, then the value of the purchase is in the license itself. Therefore, if I steal 1,000 RIAA CD's from your house, I have not actually stolen enough to cause a felony, yes?
One small problem with this type of theory: Texas is a high-stakes testing state. If they don't cover appropriate material, then these kids are gonna crash and burn on the test, which means the school eats shit.
So it would behoove a district more to dump these kids.
them: "Am I speaking with ?"
me: "Sorry, he's dead."
As a tangent to the death thing:
When my grandfather died in 1988, my grandmother chose to keep the line in his name. Didn't really think much of the idea at the time, but it works wonders for knowing who to hang up on now. No surer sign of a telemarketer than getting a phone call soliciting a guy who's been dead for 15 years.
I had a relative who was killed by a handgun. I am allowed by law to bring a civil case against the killer of the relative. Can I get a list of everyone who owns the handgun and then threaten them all with a suit? After all, the person who pulled the trigger can't hide (because, like the dish equipment, the gun would NEVER be bought on the black market), and everyone else just needs to show legit use of their gun to win.
Hey, it isn't a criminal case, it's a civil case...
Which is part of the reason I suggested that the original parent to this little spin that using Salon as an example of the way to do things was a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, I think you overestimate the school's mission. I can't give you the kind of individual service and quality education you want while still grading all of those papers.
From a high school perspective:
I will see about 150 kids over the course of 300 minutes of teaching time. That means your kid gets two minutes with me every day. This is not going to change -- it was this bad even when schools didn't suck. Now, I have several ways I can spend those two minutes. I can teach. I can oversee independent and groups work. I can grade papers. If you want me to do "C" then fine. Your kids loses out. But don't expect me to take 150 essays and grade them. Your kid gets multiple choice and true/false until the cows come home. I don't care how much we've been taught to write our multiple choice questions "upward" -- your kid isn't going to truly get an experience thinking in a "higher order".
Take the work home, you say? Oh, we'll certainly do that. We'll work at home for hours grading papers, ignoring our own families, our own kids wondering why the kids in our classes are more important than them.
As I noted in another defense of my original parent, the changes don't have to be chargable, at least not to the software supplier. There's no reason text-based rule filtering can't be employed as a part of the process, just like when we filter spam. Education on the software itself can be a part of ongoing technology seminars sponsored by the school district. If, by some chance, your district doesn't make an effort to keep its teachers apprised of new technology, it's got bigger problems than how it's grading its papers.
I also don't see peers as being an issue. Each teacher can have his or her own set of profiles for his or her own assignments. If you want to consult a peer for a second opinion, great; but that person doesn't write your grading structure.
On rating hard-working non-exceptional students against less gifted slackers: it sounds to be like you're looking to assign bonus points based on effort. I absolutely refuse to employ that. If the two papers are of the same quality, I want them to get the same grade, regardless of the effort put forth. Again, that's asking for a lawsuit, and don't claim that I'm simply taking a defensive stance -- that's an offensive one as well, because I'd sue in a second if my kid earned a lower grade on a paper due to "effort".
Now, if you want a separate, general "participation" grade to be added into the final grade of the period, that's acceptable (though I'm not big on that either). But I'm not inclined to change the grade of a paper based on who wrote it.
I'm going to expound on what I said to the first person who responded to my original post. You can catch a lot of what I leave out here, there.
First, I would never, never assign even 75% of an essay's weight to grammar and style in a high school or college environment. What that means is that a gramatically correct paper that talks about chocolate bunnies instead of the assigned topic would get a mid-range "C" on a 10-point scale. That you (or anyone) would be willing to award that much on grammar scares me. Standards like that are how GW graduated from the Ivy League with C's.
You're right that it's not about regurgitating sources. It's about successfully drawing inferences, conclusions, and judgements, making comparisons and contrasts, from the facts given you. But those ideas aren't original, as much as you'd like to think. Most of the time, she was expecting it. The teacher / professor has already written those essays, from several different perspectives. Your points aren't being earned from, "oh, that's new" but from "oh, that's on the list" Sorry to burst your bubble.
Your paper will rarely, rarely contain original ideas. Your crucial details can be reduced to an algorithm. Your wild tangent can certainly be quantified, translated into a "fluff factor" that can be expressed as a percentage of the overall length of your paper. Why? Because others before you have taken the wild tangent, and the program has been trained well enough to spot it.
I don't just imply that not using those mathematically reduceable rules is arbitrary. I'm saying outright that if the teacher doesn't have those rules in place, she's probably going to fail her peer review, and then tenure won't mean jack.
Now, on the off-chance that you have an original idea that the software doesn't catch, that's what appeal of your grade is for. It should be encouraged, and in fact it should be a right of the student, especially when the teacher isn't actually the one providing the mark.
Finally, let's do an analogy. Rules can't decide whether ideas are valid / interesting / original, you say. Last I checked, that's what we uwsed bayesian filtering for right now. We separate the meaningful text from the useless, and over time, and with training, the filter improves to near perfect, with speed and accuracy better than any human. There are false positives, but that's when the human intervenes. Same basic concept.
Keep in mind that this is all for a standarized essay, an assigned topic. This would, of course, be unacceptable for a paper where the student chose his own topic. But that's not what we're talking about here.
I'm going to expound on what I said to the first person who responded to my original post. You can catch a lot of what I leave out here, there. First, I would never, never assign even 75% of an essay's weight to grammar and style in a high school or college environment. What that means is that a gramatically correct paper that talks about chocolate bunnies instead of the assigned topic would get a mid-range "C" on a 10-point scale. That you (or anyone) would be willing to award that much on grammar scares me. Standards like that are how GW graduated from the Ivy League with C's. You're right that it's not about regurgitating sources. It's about successfully drawing inferences, conclusions, and judgements, making comparisons and contrasts, from the facts given you. But those ideas aren't original, as much as you'd like to think. Most of the time, she was expecting it. The teacher / professor has already written those essays, from several different perspectives. Your points aren't being earned from, "oh, that's new" but from "oh, that's on the list" Sorry to burst your bubble. Your paper will rarely, rarely contain original ideas. Your crucial details can be reduced to an algorithm. Your wild tangent can certainly be quantified, translated into a "fluff factor" that can be expressed as a percentage of the overall length of your paper. Why? Because others before you have taken the wild tangent, and the program has been trained well enough to spot it. I don't just imply that not using those mathematically reduceable rules is arbitrary. I'm saying outright that if the teacher doesn't have those rules in place, she's probably going to fail her peer review, and then tenure won't mean jack. Now, on the off-chance that you have an original idea that the software doesn't catch, that's what appeal of your grade is for. It should be encouraged, and in fact it should be a right of the student, especially when the teacher isn't actually the one providing the mark. Finally, let's do an analogy. Rules can't decide whether ideas are valid / interesting / original, you say. Last I checked, that's what we uwsed bayesian filtering for right now. We separate the meaningful text from the useless, and over time, and with training, the filter improves to near perfect, with speed and accuracy better than any human. There are false positives, but that's when the human intervenes. Same basic concept. Keep in mind that this is all for a standarized essay, an assigned topic. This would, of course, be unacceptable for a paper where the student chose his own topic. But that's not what we're talking about here.
Sigh, a troll, a flamebait, and a human taco walk into a bar...
Ok, let's address this anyway, even though you don't deserve it by your conduct. Teachers are not allowed, by professional standards, to assign grades to essays based on which ones he or she likes. It sounds insane to the outside world, I know, but it's also a good way to protect from a lawsuit (coverage is not usually a benefit of employment -- for me it's going to be about $300 next year for $1M indemnity)
Think about this for a minute. Two kids write papers. One gets a "B" and the other gets a "C". They cover the same material in their writings, and make a roughly equal number of errors gramatically. The difference: the teacher likes one paper more. What happens? Lawsuit. Don't say it won't happen. It does, every damn day.
A high school essay is not about writing "interesting". There are creative writing assignments, and in those it should be more of a factor. But the essay (ideally) is about demonstrating that you are able to take the facts given you and translate those into stances, conclusions, or judgements via higher-order thinking.
An experienced teacher will have most contengencies for these stances established and fleshed out in the form of rubrics. She's essentially already written your essay, and your friend's essay, and the essay of that geeky chick with the braces behind you. That "unique" perspective you have on Napoleon and his complex about his height? It's already been planned for.
If (and this is admittedly a critical and not guaranteed if) the skills of the teacher's rubric writing can be translated into programming algorithms for essay checking, there's no reason why a teacher's workload can't be greatly lessened, and his or her examination of papers lessened to challenges from students (which should be encouraged within reason, as this can demonstrate the same higher-order thinking sought in a well-constructed essay question.)
Now will the program miss things? Yes. But if the teacher is professional, and the student has the will to defend his or her stance, the "error" will be corrected, and the new data will be, barring beauacracy, factored into the next iteration of the algorithm.
btw: I don't need a program to tell the difference between who's and whose. Fortunately, it'll catch that for me, too.
I have been trolled, poorly. I've having a very nice day, though.
That's a great idea! Hey everyone, e-mail me all of your old essays, for, er, "testing"
There is no "humanity" in a modern constructed essay. There are certainly going to be "judgement calls" when standards are not as fully fleshed out for the computer as they should be, but as long as those are appealable, I have no problem having a computer assign me the other 95% of my essay points. The only instructors who will fear this are those who like to assign grades arbitrarily. And I don't feel too sympathetic toward those people.
Well, the big reason he was taking his sweet time was that the federal prosecutor sealed the charges. When you see sealed charges today, you know that's the thing that goes hand-in-hand with being disappeared and threatened with charges of terrorism if you don't plead guilty.
Sorry, but I don't think I'd do anything different in those circumstances.
A Peter Principle Postulate: If President of the United States is the highest position a person can hold in this country, and people always rise to the level of their incompetence, does this mean we have never had a competent President?
How do you put a company in jail? That's easy. You clean out the Board of Directors, appoint a special master, and put the company in receivership for the length of the sentence. If a company commits a crime that gets it 3 years, then it spends three years being run by outside people. If it gets the death penalty, then it's dissolved and its various components are sold to the highest bidder.
Pretty straightforward, really.
But a few more weeks and they'll be able to score that can of anchovies that Mom's been eyeing.
I disagree. You noted that over time we can crouch with a keyboard as well as we do in real life. This is primarily for those of us who play games a lot and develop a standard interface we use across all games of a genre. I mean, when you play an FPS that allows for remapping, you almost always use the same key across each game for a given function, right? So to me, a clean consistent mapping that can in general be agreed upon is what will make things easier. After all, how would you do driving someone else's car if they used something other than a steering wheel for controls?
We're getting sent the worm every couple of minutes. First from one source, then a second. Really pissing me off. Tracking it down has convinced me that it's a relative of the boss's wife who's a primary source for us, but noone will return my f*cking messages so I can't get this crap brought down.
Hey, I'm staying on the clock until they call me back. Damaging or not, this is gonna be one expensive worm.
Lemme get this straight. They got the Viola dude on the stand, and the judge made a finding of law (not of fact, because that's not his job) that his testimony was immaterial.
Someone PLEASE tell me where I can get a transcript of this?
(and tell Granny to get out while the getting's good)
Web designers (at least those who do more than just muck about in Frontpage) have experience in developing the user interfaces that are part of websites. We've seen 100 different ways of conducting logins, and we're familiar with what works and what doesn't. We often CAN log in with our eyes closed.
When we say that you could have done a better job on your site, it's usually because you could have.
Except that the U.S.'s stance on the Taliban was that it was not the rightful government of Afghanistan. Therefore, Hawash did not violate his oath if he aided them.
You missed my question entirely, I think.
A "purchased" CD has two components, the physical media and a license. My question is, how much of that $12 goes to the media, and how much to the license?
But to what part of these are the costs attributed. Since the physical media has a retail value of pennies, if that, then the value of the purchase is in the license itself. Therefore, if I steal 1,000 RIAA CD's from your house, I have not actually stolen enough to cause a felony, yes?
One small problem with this type of theory: Texas is a high-stakes testing state. If they don't cover appropriate material, then these kids are gonna crash and burn on the test, which means the school eats shit.
So it would behoove a district more to dump these kids.
me: "Sorry, he's dead."
As a tangent to the death thing:
When my grandfather died in 1988, my grandmother chose to keep the line in his name. Didn't really think much of the idea at the time, but it works wonders for knowing who to hang up on now. No surer sign of a telemarketer than getting a phone call soliciting a guy who's been dead for 15 years.
There's always the ever popular:
420 Server Wasted
I had a relative who was killed by a handgun. I am allowed by law to bring a civil case against the killer of the relative. Can I get a list of everyone who owns the handgun and then threaten them all with a suit? After all, the person who pulled the trigger can't hide (because, like the dish equipment, the gun would NEVER be bought on the black market), and everyone else just needs to show legit use of their gun to win.
Hey, it isn't a criminal case, it's a civil case...
Which is part of the reason I suggested that the original parent to this little spin that using Salon as an example of the way to do things was a bad idea.
Of course, the scary part will be when Jabba the Hutt purchases your frozen balls for his private collection.
Bad example. One thing Salon's not gonna avoid is bankruptcy.
As opposed to a Sci-Fi Role-Playing Game perhaps?