Bringing Auto-Graders To Student Essays 227
fishmike writes with this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"American high school students are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots. Or, more accurately, robo-readers — computers programmed to scan student essays and spit out a grade. The theory is that teachers would assign more writing if they didn't have to read it. And the more writing students do, the better at it they'll become — even if the primary audience for their prose is a string of algorithms. ... Take, for instance, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a web-based tool marketed by Pearson Education, Inc. Within seconds, it can analyze an essay for spelling, grammar, organization and other traits and prompt students to make revisions. The program scans for key words and analyzes semantic patterns, and Pearson boasts it 'can "understand" the meaning of text much the same as a human reader.' Jehn, the Harvard writing instructor, isn't so sure. He argues that the best way to teach good writing is to help students wrestle with ideas; misspellings and syntax errors in early drafts should be ignored in favor of talking through the thesis."
Grade This, Robot: +5, Seditious (Score:3, Funny)
Allow me to introduce myself. I'm the founder of the Anti-My School Society. In this letter, I will tell you what made me form such an organization and how I plan to use it to strengthen our roots so we can weather the storms that threaten our foundation. Let me cut to the chase: Relative to just a few years ago, the worst sorts of flippant ogres I've ever seen are nearly ten times as likely to believe that the key to living a long and happy life is to provide contumacious conspiracies with the necessary asylum to take root and spread. This is neither a coincidence nor simply a sign of the times. Rather, it reflects a sophisticated, psychological warfare program designed by My School to work hand-in-glove with what I call intrusive vocabularians.
Even as I write those words I can feel My School cringe. That's okay. Cringe. I don't care because it appears to have found a new tool to use to help it make us the helpless puppets of our demographic labels. That tool is obstructionism, and if you watch it wield it you'll honestly see why it's good at one thing, and that's keeping its ulterior motives secret. Only a few initiates in the inner sanctum of My School's cabal know that it's planning to advocate fatalistic acceptance of a perfidious new world order. Even fewer of these initiates know that I don't need to tell you that we have fallen into My School's trap. That should be self-evident. What is less evident is that My School has two imperatives. The first is to judge people based solely on hearsay. The second imperative is to call for a return to that which wasn't particularly good in the first place.
If you were to tell My School that right is right and wrong is wrong, it'd just pull its security blanket a little tighter around itself and refuse to come out and deal with the real world. My School likes to talk about how cell-phone towers are in fact covert mind-control devices that use scalar waves to beam images into people's brains while they sleep. The words sound pretty until you read between the lines and see that My School is secretly saying that it intends to calumniate helpless rapscallions. I want to advance a clear, credible, and effective vision for dealing with our present dilemma and its most misinformed manifestations, but I can't do that alone. So do me a favor and point out that the emperor has no clothes on. That'll show My School that it's possible that it doesn't realize this because it has been ingrained with so much of Chekism's propaganda. If that's the case, I recommend that we enable adversaries to meet each other and establish direct personal bonds that contradict the stereotypes they rely upon to power their conceited ramblings. Not to put too fine a point on it, but My School's winged monkeys don't want us to disseminate as widely as possible all of the information we have regarding My School's cruel theatrics. That'd be too much of a threat to imperialism, simplism, and all of the other carnaptious things they worship. Clearly, they prefer seizing control of the power structure.
Efforts to create a factitious demand for My School's spleeny, uncouth analects are not vestiges of a former era. They are the beginnings of a phenomenon which, if permitted to expand unchecked, will push all of us to the brink of insanity. My School exists for one reason and for one reason only: to intensify or perpetuate hoodlumism. My goal is to challenge the present and enrich the future. I will not stint in my labor in this direction. When I have succeeded, the whole world will know that My School somehow manages to get away with spreading lies (big emotions come from big words), distortions (honor counts for nothing), and misplaced idealism (it has a "special" perspective on mandarinism that carries with it a "special" right to worsen an already unstable situation). However, when I try to respond in kind, I get censored faster than you can say "archaeopterygiformes".
While there's no dispute that My School is whiney and probably a little counterproductive, it's also cunning, implacabl
Re:DON'T DO IT !! (Score:1, Funny)
In Kazakhstan, Profs always looking for sexy time !!
Re:Grade This, Robot: +5, Seditious (Score:4, Funny)
Grade: C+
Comments:
-Comprehensive.
-Structured arguments ("dichotomy within hegemonic discourse")
-Good vocabulary ("archaeopterygiformes")
-Some capitalisation problems ("My School")
Time: CPU 23.84 s, Wall: 24.09 s
Re:Why not fewer students and more face-to-face ti (Score:5, Funny)
It seems to me that the way English classes are normally taught, they have nothing to do with English at all.
You have found the hidden meaning behind English classes.
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BMO
Re:Why not fewer students and more face-to-face ti (Score:5, Funny)
If they had things that did that when I was in college, I probably would have spent most of my time trying to come up with syntactically correct nonsense.