Les Perelman, former professor of writing at MIT and inventor of the BABEL generator, has repeatedly exposed the quackery in computer-scoring of essays. If you want to learn how to generate an essay that will win a high score but make no sense, google the “BABEL Generator,” which was developed by Perelman and his students at MIT to fool the robocomputer graders. He explains here, in an original piece published nowhere else, why the American public needs an FDA for assessments, to judge their quality.
He writes:
An FDA for Educational Assessment, particularly for Computer Assessments
As a new and much saner administration takes over the US Department of Education led by Secretary of Education Designate, Miguel Cardona, it is a good time, especially regarding assessment, to ask Juvenal’s famous question of “Who Watches the Watchman.”
Several years ago, I realized computer applications designed to assess student writing did not understand the essays they evaluated but simply counted proxies such as the length of an essays, the number of sentences in each paragraph, and the frequency of infrequently used words. In 2014, I and three undergraduate researchers from Harvard and MIT, developed the Basic Automatic CONTINUE READING: Les Perelman: We Need an FDA for Educational Assessments | Diane Ravitch's blog