An essay about Christopher Columbus might ramble on about Queen Isabella sailing with 1492 soldiers to the Island of Ferdinand - and still be rated as solidly on topic, Shermis said.Ĭomputers also have a hard time dealing with experimental prose. “I’m sure children feel the same way.”Įven supporters of robo-grading acknowledge its limitations.Ī prankster could outwit many scoring programs by jumbling key phrases in a nonsensical order.

“I like to know I’m writing for a real flesh-and-blood reader who is excited by the words on the page,” Jehn said. What’s more, Jehn said he worries that students will give up striving to craft a beautiful metaphor or insightful analogy if they know their essays will not be read, but scanned for a split second by a computer program. “Then start looking for whether the commas are in the right place.” No computer, he said, can do that. “Try to find the idea that’s percolating,” he said. 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. Jehn, the Harvard writing instructor, isn’t so sure. 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.” Within seconds, it can analyze an essay for spelling, grammar, organization and other traits and prompt students to make revisions. Take, for instance, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a web-based tool marketed by Pearson Education, Inc. If students finish an essay at 10 p.m., they get feedback at 10:01.” The Hewlett contest aims to change that by demonstrating that computers can grade as perceptively as English teachers - only much more quickly and without all that depressing red ink.Īutomated essay scoring is “nonjudgmental,” Shermis said. And A merican teachers by and large have been reluctant to turn their students’ homework assignments over to robo-graders. Today, computers are used to grade essays on South Dakota’s student writing assessments and a handful of other high-stakes exams, in cluding the TOEFL test of English fluency, taken by foreign students.īut machines do not grade essays on either the SAT or the ACT, the two primary college entrance exams. In the late 1990s, as technology improved, several textbook and testing companies jumped into the field. He paused a moment.Īutomated essay grading was first proposed in the 1960s, but computers back then were not up to the task. “Wow,” said Thomas Jehn, director of the Harvard College Writing Program. “If you’re a high school teacher and you give a writing assignment, you’re walking home with 150 essays,” Shermis said. He’s helping to supervise a contest, set up by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, that promises $100,000 in prize money to programmers who write the best automated grading software. That sounds logical to Mark Shermis, dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron. A nd 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. The theory is that teachers would assign more writing if they didn’t have to read it. Or, more accurately, robo-readers - computers programmed to scan student essays and spit out a grade. March 27 (Reuters) - American high school students are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots.

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