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."
Why not fewer students and more face-to-face time? (Score:5, Interesting)
The best English professor I had in college would arrange to have every student come in to her office after papers had been turned in, reading each paper in the presence of the student who had written it and discussing it in depth while grading it.
Re:Why not fewer students and more face-to-face ti (Score:5, Interesting)
The best English teacher I had was my English instructor my first year of undergrad. Instead of concentrating on whether we were writing our papers to the curriculum and/or her own beliefs about the content, she was instead interested in developing our English skills.
I went from a C student in English to an A student. I never considered myself to have any ability to write, thankfully because someone took the time to actually think critically about my work instead of comparing it to their own preconceived notions I excelled and went on to complete a research and writing focused program. This degree later fed into my graduate degree which was also research and writing focused.
If this automated grading setup can provide students with clear expectations and explanations of the mechanics of their work while avoiding personal content expectations, I really do think it'll match the claims and help to foster a positive writing environment for many.
Re:How stupid can you get? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one area where automatic grading will cause massive skill decrease, as no auto-grader can actually assess contents.
There was a guy who was doing Latent Semantic Analysis on papers in order to grade them. The program would parse out the collection of words and assign a form of "meaning" to the words, and see if those "meanings" matched up with the reference "meanings" from another paper. This would show that the writer actually understood the terms correct, and used the appropriately in relation to the other words.
They did attempt to cheat the system and actually found that if one were extremely well versed on the topic of the essay, one could write gibberish that the grader would give good grades to. However, the level of knowledge of the subject necessary to cheat turned out to be greater than the knowledge of the subject necessary to write a good essay... so they suggested that the easiest way to cheat the system was to "know the subject, and write a good essay".
Re:Why not fewer students and more face-to-face ti (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why not fewer students and more face-to-face ti (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll be honest. I agree with this guy and I most certainly do not have aspergers. :)
High school level English consists of reading dull books and then writing character analyses and other crap about them. Unfortunately, at least in my experiences, being able to analyze characters and plots wasn't a skill that I gleaned by suffering through 1800's romance novels, it was a skill that I learned from writing fiction on my own. I started out very bad at writing, as most people do, because in all the time they spend forcing "classics" down your throat, they never teach you to write -- they just expect you to. (Sure, they teach you grammar and syntax and how to structure a paper, but they don't teach you a damn thing about how to write fiction, which is ironic since English classes focus on it so heavily.)
Interestingly, if I went back and took those classes now (with a mind for the teacher as my audience) I'd be an A student, but not because of anything I learned in English classes.
Re:Infer the hidden meaning... (Score:5, Interesting)