<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/education/robo-readers-used-to-grade-test-essays.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/education/robo-readers-used-to-grade-test-essays.html</a></p>
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<p>reading the essay rated a 6 by the computer is eye-opening.</p>
<p>Darn. That should be “want” in the title. I guess it was one letter too long.</p>
<p>yeah, that extra letter would probably get you a 3. :D</p>
<p>I thought you’d done it on purpose, since you are witty like that, to be honest.</p>
<p>Thanks! yeah, sure, that’s what I meant. :)</p>
<p>No, but seriously, automation gone too far. This is about as awful as it gets.</p>
<p>Read this earlier today. Felt sick.</p>
<p>Good thing Hemingway didn’t get graded on long, complex sentence structure.</p>
<p>That must be what they use to grade the WASL. ( Washington state test).</p>
<p>I like the idea of the smartphones generating essays and submitting them directly to the robo-grader.</p>
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<p>Yep. What happened to DEAR days. What happened to parerents who cared about reading? And here’s one from my oldest’s librarian: what ever happened to TV turn Off Week?</p>
<p>Well that was depressing. I heard it discussed on NPR as well.</p>
<p>I spend a whole lot of time grading essays (college level), and I’m actually looking at the “Thinking” rather than counting uses of “moreover” (which gets used entirely too many times, and usually wrongly.) This kind of stuff is making it harder and harder for me. Students come out of HS thinking that the kind of writing they learn for all the tests will get by in college. First thing they have to do is unlearn much of what they show up with. Writing and critical thinking skills are degenerating. It really is depressing.</p>
<p>^ It’s interesting you grade college student writing, Garland. Our older one was often confused during his undergrad years by the grading of his writing. Certain classes seemed impossible for him to get an A on his writing – usually humanities. Others, if he put the time in went much better. He had one class where writing was graded randomly by a set of TFs. Some TFs seemed to really like his writing, others not. The whole experience drove home for us how subjective the process of grading – at least college level – writing really is!</p>
<p>Sewhappy, I am fortunate that at both schools I work at, we work together to stake out common expectations and grading standards. Obviously, we can’t be always absolutely identical in our commenting and grading, but at both programs, we frequently have grading sessions where, using the rubric and/or standards of the writing program, we grade and explain our grade for the same essay, so we can adjust our outlook to the program standards. This is for freshman comp programs. Unfortunately, in other classes, professors might have different expectations–in formatting, organization, etc, that don’t entirely conform to what the comp classes are doing (where I t each, the humanties classes are usually very close to what we do, but other disciplines are more likely to have a different approach.) I would hope professors would communicate what it is they’re looking for, but of course, some may not. Overall, I’ve found that students who do well in comp usually also do well in other class writing, but there’s always that professor whom no one can get an A with, or that a student just doesn’t seem to jive with for whatever reason! (We’ve probably all had a couple of them!)</p>
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That was my experience too. Several of my professors in my field went out of their way to tell me how much they liked the way I wrote. In another course I couldn’t seem to get better than a B. At one point the TA put the A papers on file in the library and I hated them all. Horrible jargon filled, meandering… Ugh! There was no way I even wanted to write like that. After that the game was to see how little I could do and still get my B. My best was to read 3 pages of Nietsche from the entire fat book, and write my paper. Not one of the high points of my Harvard education, though I actually learned a lot from the lectures in that course, Sam Beer was brilliant. The depressing thing was that my Mom had taken the same course and gotten an A! (Just looked him up, he only died a couple of years ago at the age of 97.)</p>
<p>The college freshman who, it was reported, spilled yogurt on Obama yesterday was interviewed this morning. (She did not spill anything on Obama; she had complied with Secret Service orders to put all food and drinks on the ground, and someone else kicked it and Obama was sprayed.) Her interview began: “Me and my friends were…”</p>
<p>Very discouraging.</p>
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<p>It has been noted in other threads that some readers prefer certain styles of writing. For example, there was the context of a student who had a very terse and precise writing style that tended to be disfavored by English teachers. The student in question wanted to go into some STEM subject, where being terse and precise may be more likely to be favored.</p>
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<p>Well, that is presumably one of the problems that robo-grading is intended to solve (along with the inexpensive scaling up of numbers of essays that can be graded). However, it brings its own problems as described in the article (e.g. being able to be gamed to give a good score to a poor essay).</p>
<p>I have long thought that the very hardest thing to do well would be to teach writing. I so admire those who do it really well. My kids have had a few great writing teachers, especially my younger one and I tell her how fortunate she has been.</p>
<p>This was part of a huge controversy at my old high school this past year. A parent complained about the AP English students reading “Beloved” saying that it was nothing more than pornography. One of their biggest arguments is that it was ranked low by some e-Rater even though anyone who has ever read it can clearly tell that it’s NOT at the level that it was rated.</p>