Grading Software Fooled By Nonsense Essay Generator 187
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.).'"
most schools ignore sat essay (Score:4, Insightful)
Irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't need software (Score:4, Insightful)
... because Slashdot shows that humans already make evaluations about articles without reading them.
Quid pro quo (Score:4, Insightful)
When you're too lazy to read my essay to grade me and let software do it, I don't really see no moral problem with doing the same to write the essay.
Re:To generate the keywords takes knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
How on earth did you guys let it get so ridiculous??
Works on Slashdot posts, too! (Score:5, Insightful)
Artificial intelligence, while seemingly tasty on the surface, tends to be underwhelmed by insufficient fish, with regard to warrantless searches.
Re:Quid pro quo (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who graded hundreds of essays while serving as a teaching assistant for a senior-level engineering ethics course, I have to say that I find your lack of integrity rather appalling. Your moral obligation to write the essay yourself is independent of the method they use for grading it. Just because someone else is doing a lousy job does not mean that you suddenly have a license to short-change them for what you're obligated to do.
I would guess that I graded around 300-400 essays during the three semesters I served as a TA, and that I probably averaged around 20 minutes per essay, since I was a strong believer in providing useful feedback over things the students could improve, even if they weren't necessarily incorrect. That said, other TAs spent as little as a minute or two per essay, and barely provided any feedback at all. Regardless of how much time the TAs did or didn't spend on the essays, however, the students had the same obligations, and rightfully so.
Let me put it in Engineering terms... (Score:2, Insightful)
If I've been hired to build a Potemkin village, then it would be unethical of me to spend time constructing interiors for the buildings.
The English department has some nice courses on compositional writing where I can get real feedback on my progress on those skills. As far as the machine-graded essays for any other Department -- either I understood the topic before writing the essay or I didn't and if I didn't then a no-feedback essay isn't going to fix the problem.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:most schools ignore sat essay (Score:3, Insightful)
Odd you choose math as an example, a subject where your grammar must be perfect or what you've written is nonsense.
Re:most schools ignore sat essay (Score:3, Insightful)