A New Standard for Excellence: The Ability to Cheat Without Getting Caught
The brave new world of computer grading has arrived. Not only will sweatshop graders lose their jobs to the more efficient technology of the e-Raters, but those being scored by the new e-Raters will be rewarded for developing the skills needed to succeed on Wall Street, where facts don't matter as long as you can fool the algorithm.
A recently released study has concluded that computers are capable of scoring essays on standardized tests as well as human beings do.
Mark Shermis, dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron, collected more than 16,000 middle school and high school test essays from six states that had been graded by humans. He then used automated systems developed by nine companies to score those essays.
Computer scoring produced “virtually identical levels of accuracy, with the software in some cases