A Seventh Grader Kicks Edgenuity's Dumb Robograding Butt
A Seventh Grader Kicks Edgenuity's Dumb Robograding Butt
The story comes to us from Francesca Paris at NPR's Here and Now, and it can serve as our sixty-gazillionth reminder that computer algorithms-- even ones that are marketed as Artificial Intelligence-- cannot grade student work to save their cybernetic lives.
A student in LAUSD's virtual school was dismayed when his first history assignment came back an F. It was short written responses, and the score came back instantly, so his mother figured out that it had been graded by the software and not a human being. But we just saw here a short time ago, computer algorithms can't really read, and they don't understand content--which would seem to be a real drawback when scoring history assignments.
This particular virtual school product is from Edgenuity, one of the more widely used school-in-a-can computer products. Its CEO won recognition at the EdTech Awards last year, and the company is in something like 20,000 schools. But it gets plenty of criticism for being standardized to death. It doesn't appear to have a great deal of bench strength when it comes to questions; users talk about how easy it is to just google answers while taking assessments, and Slate discovered that students can do well by just repeatedly taking tests, which turn out to ask mostly the same CONTINUE READING: A Seventh Grader Kicks Edgenuity's Dumb Robograding Butt