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."
Re:How stupid can you get? (Score:4, Informative)
BTW, thanks for the "Latent Semantic Analysis" reference, I'll store it carefully... just in case the humanity decides it needs to become more stupid in an automated way.
Latent semantic analysis [wikipedia.org] has uses far beyond just grading papers. It really is one of the most interesting techniques that we have to assign "meaning" to words. And just like a human being, after being trained sufficiently, it starts getting more information about words by where they are NOT used, than by where they are used.
Apple used (uses?) it in the spam filter for Mail.app. Meaning it was able to identify spam that used words similarly, and similar words to previously identified spam... it also makes searching for prior art in patent applications much easier, as well as an enormous number of other interesting uses that would not qualify as "making humanity stupider".
Re:Why not fewer students and more face-to-face ti (Score:3, Informative)
Writers have placed hidden meaning into their work to express opinions that are not socially accepted or possibly illegal for a very long time. In order to actually understand what any of it means you must first have foreknowledge of the writer, their culture, common issues of the time, and imagery. Even then unless the writer has later explained these things then you will probably never know if those hidden messages were really ever there. Grading someone on it means your teachers/professors were not very good at their profession.