Can algorithms really teach kids to write better? Algorithms are grading student essays are trying. - Vox

Can algorithms really teach kids to write better? Algorithms are grading student essays are trying. - Vox

Algorithms are grading student essays across the country. Can it really teach kids how to write better?
The AI algorithms grading student essays are a black box.

Algorithms are grading student essays across the country. So can artificial intelligence really teach us to write better?

Todd Feathers, who wrote about AI essay grading for Motherboard, called up every state in the country and found that at least 21 states use some form of automated scoring.

“The algorithms are prone to a couple of flaws. One is that they can be fooled by any kind of nonsense gibberish sophisticated words. It looks good from afar but it doesn’t actually mean anything. And the other problem is that some of the algorithms have been proven by the testing vendors themselves to be biased against people from certain language backgrounds.”

Feathers wasn’t able to pin down exactly how many students are affected by this. But here’s what we do know: These programs are being used to grade students of all ages and levels, from high school students to students applying to grad school, from middle school students even down to those in elementary school.

The reason it’s so hard to figure out who’s affected by AI grading is because there’s no one program that’s being used. There are a bunch of different algorithms, made by a bunch of different companies. But they’re all made in basically the same way: First, an automated scoring company looks at how human graders behave. Then, the company trains an algorithm to make predictions as to how a human grader might score an essay based on that data. Depending on the program, those predictions can be consistently wrong in the same way. In other words, they can be biased. And once those algorithms are built, explains Reset host Arielle Duhaime-Ross, they can reproduce those biases at a huge scale.

And the worst part? You can’t cross-examine an algorithm and get to the bottom of why it CONTINUE READING: Can algorithms really teach kids to write better? Algorithms are grading student essays are trying. - Vox