More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer
Here's a little pop quiz.
Multiple-choice tests are useful because:
A: They're cheap to score.
B: They can be scored quickly.
C: They score without human bias.
D: All of the above.
It would take a computer about a nano-second to mark "D" as the correct answer. That's easy.
But now, machines are also grading students' essays. Computers are scoring long form answers on anything from the fall of the Roman Empire, to the pros and cons of government regulations.
Developers of so-called "robo-graders" say they understand why many students and teachers would be skeptical of the idea. But they insist, with computers already doing jobs as complicated and as fraught as driving cars, detecting cancer, and carrying on conversations, they can certainly handle grading students' essays.
"I've been working on this now for about 25 years, and I feel that ... the time is right and it's really starting to be used now," says Peter Foltz, a research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He's also vice president for research for Pearson, the company whose automated scoring program graded some 34 million student essays on state and national high-stakes tests last year. "There will always be people who don't trust it ... but we're seeing a lot more breakthroughs in areas like content understanding, and AI is now able to do things which they couldn't do really well before."
Foltz says computers "learn" what's considered good writing by analyzing essays graded by humans. Then, the automated programs score essays themselves by scanning for those same features.
"We have artificial intelligence techniques which can judge anywhere from 50 to 100 features," Foltz says. That includes not only basics like spelling and grammar, but also whether a student is on topic, the coherence or the flow of an argument, and the complexity of word choice and sentence structure. "We've done a number of studies to show that the scoring can be highly accurate," he says.
To demonstrate, he takes a not-so-stellar sample essay, rife with spelling mistakes and Continue reading: More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer : NPR
The Fraud of Computer Scoring on the Common Core Exams - Network For Public Education - https://wp.me/s3bR9v-6488 via @Network4pubEd
