Three rules for robograding, and other ed-tech innovations
Automated grading of students’ essays and short answers has been around for almost 20 years, but it’s engendering quite a bit of controversy as the technology progresses. A large study released in April, connected to a competition sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation, showed the grades assigned by a computer program to 22,000 7th, 8th and 10th grade essays matched very closely with the grades assigned by trained teachers to those same essays. The results have been watched eagerly, as the phase-in of Common Core state standards brings with it new assessments that require students towrite more, at more length. But states aren’t necessarily getting more money to pay for grading the tests.
Money is not the only issue. Any teacher will tell you that grading papers is not generally the most beloved part of the job, and the time that it takes means that students often must wait days, weeks, or months to get feedback on their written work, which is not ideal for learning.
graphic by Vic Paruchuri
Automated essay scoring (AES) engines do not read essays. They use “machine learning” algorithms, trained on numerous examples, to match general characteristics of essays (such as spelling, sentence length, subject-verb agreement, or the use of particular words and phrases in response to a prompt) to similar essays assigned a given grade by humans. Their results are available instantly.
Recently, Vic Paruchuri, one of the creators of a winning AES system who currently works on automated essay grading for the MOOC platform edX, wrote about the lessons learned from
Why states are backing out on common standards and tests
The bloom is surely off the rose of Common Core, the new English and math standards pushed by Washington, D.C. education trade organizations and the Obama administration. In the last few months, a number of states have paused or de-funded implementation of the standards; others have pulled out of the consortia developing tests tied to them.
Charles Chieppo, left, and Jamie Gass.
In recent years, the Obama administration has made a number of federal goodies, such as Race to the Top grants and No Child Left Behind waivers, contingent on states’ adoption of Common Core standards and assessments. But now that Race to the Top money has been spent, states are belatedly taking a clear-eyed look at Common Core. High-performing states in particular won’t like what they see.
In a recent Boston Globe op-ed marking the 20th anniversary of the Massachusetts education reform law that triggered dramatic improvements in the performance of Bay State students, Tom Birmingham, one of the law’s principal authors, wrote: “the political vectors will all tend to push the new standards to a race to the middle … In implementing the Common Core, there will be natural pressure to set the national standards at levels that are realistically achievable by students in all states. This marks a retreat from Massachusetts’ current high standards.”
Birmingham, a Rhodes Scholar and former president of the Massachusetts Senate, may well be among the least calculating or self-serving people ever to have attained high elective office, but it