Automated System Developed To Grade Student Essays 253
RougeFemme points out this story at the Times about software that can be used to grade student essays and offer almost instant feedback. "Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the 'send' button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade. EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks."
This is horrid (Score:5, Insightful)
One of my kids had something like this: not for English, but for physics.
The teacher couldn't be bothered to assign and grade proper homework.
Instead, he fobbed the kids off onto a web app.
- go to the site
- get a problem
- solve the problem
- type in the numerical answer
- right answer? go on to the next problem
- wrong answer? try again
The web app allowed maybe 0.5% margin for rounding error, and you got 5 tries before it failed you on that problem.
It sounds reasonable in the abstract, but in practice it was utterly wretched.
All learning is, at some level, an interaction--a conversation--between student and teacher.
Even if it is nothing more than a red check mark or a red X on a homework paper,
you have communicated some thing to some person and gotten some response.
You don't realize how important this is until it is gone.
With nothing but a machine to talk to, it stops being about learning.
It is just about satisfying the machine by whatever means necessary.
In his rage and frustration my son told me that the easiest way to solve the problems was to copy and paste the problem text in to google.
This would reliably return the general formula for solving that problem;
plugging in the numbers that the web app had generated for your instance of the problem would then yield the correct answer.
By the end of the school year, I was telling him that if he didn't want to deal with the web app, he should use google to get his grade,
and if he wanted to learn physics, I would teach it to him.
Automated essay grading is going to be even worse.
There is no point writing prose unless a human is going to read it.
When I want to talk to machines, I write code.
Writing songs, that voices never shared...
-- Paul Simon
Re:This is horrid (Score:5, Interesting)
I went through the same system and it taught me all sorts of useful things unrelated to my actual physics curriculum, like
1/2 != 2/4
0.5 != 1/2
x != x+1-1
x^2 != x*x
Re:This is horrid (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is horrid (Score:5, Interesting)
Best benefit? Getting a group of people in the same place to research, debate, and agree on a single answer, then be open-minded and organized enough to shape the solution to fit the constraints given.
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Re:This is horrid (Score:4, Insightful)
Math is about simplification, but simplicity is subjective.
1/2 is simpler than 2/4, but not if you have something like this: 2/4 * a + 3/4 * b + 1/4 * c
maybe all this would be simpler as: (2a + 3b + c)/ 4 or maybe not it depends on the application...
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Simplified isn't subjective.
What is the objective defintion of "simplified"?
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Repetition is how we learn. We learn by repeating things more often. We tend to remember things that repeated better, and repeating an action tends to get it into our brain's more permanent memory.
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Repetition is how we learn.
Really? I tend to forget things I don't care about even if I try to drill the information into my brain; it's a temporary solution for me at best. However, things that I actually care about will simply be retained in my memory in no time at all, and I never give myself any silly repetitive assignments.
Maybe we should be focusing on making things more meaningful to people?
Re:This is horrid (Score:4, Informative)
Better than you think (Score:4, Informative)
It sounds reasonable in the abstract, but in practice it was utterly wretched.
No, the abstract does not sound reasonable: as with most things online you can always find bad ways to do it. I'm a physics prof working as part of a team to develop an open source, algebra capable question and content system. However even the current capabilities of something like Moodle [moodle.org] (which is Open Source) is far in excess of what you describe. You can type in multiple "answers" to a problem and have the student get feedback and a partial grade if they get the problem wrong in a way that you managed to guess. Obviously if they find a new way to get it wrong then they will not get feedback though.
Commercial systems go even further with the student having the option to click on a help button which can break the question into steps for the student to complete in rder to guide them through to the right answer. This can be configured to give a grade penalty at the choice of the instructor - this is one of the features we want to add to an Open Source solution.
However even with current Moodle capabilities you can build a system that, I would argue, is better pedagogically for many physics problems (those with numerical or symbolic responses) than paper-graded assignments because, with an online system with some feedback and multiple attempts the student is encouraged to keep trying until they figure out how to get it right. This encourages them to think out the solution themselves whereas with a paper assignment they get one try and are then given the answer. To make this work though you need some means for students to come and talk to you and/or TAs to provide some help towards getting the right method. So you still need the student-teacher interaction but computers can provide a first line of contact and so let a teacher help more students.
That being said I find it exceedingly unlikely that this EdX system can work for written responses beyond checking that their english is good. For physics how can it possibly know that the statement "the Higgs boson has a mass of 140 GeV/c2" is wrong and "Dark Matter does not interact with photons" is correct? To be able to grade it will have to know a huge amount of information about a massive range of topics - and looking this stuff up on Google is not an option given all the crazy people and their wacky physics theories which they stick on a web page.
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That sounds like he has a pretty good teacher. If it were me, I'd be fine with the link Google produced. :P
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In his rage and frustration my son told me that the easiest way to solve the problems was to copy and paste the problem text in to google. This would reliably return the general formula for solving that problem
Isn't that what physics is? Applying the right formula? I don't think much is gained by having students memorize formulas anyway. In real life you just look up general formulas on google/wikipedia/wolfram and apply them to your specific problem. I suppose it's useful to be able to derive certain formulas as a method to gain greater insight into patterns and ways of thinking, but I don't think this depth is commonly required in high school.
If it were my kid, I'd rather he knew how to google formulas and
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Isn't that what physics is? Applying the right formula? I don't think much is gained by having students memorize formulas anyway. In real life you just look up general formulas on google/wikipedia/wolfram and apply them to your specific problem. I suppose it's useful to be able to derive certain formulas as a method to gain greater insight into patterns and ways of thinking, but I don't think this depth is commonly required in high school.
If it were my kid, I'd rather he knew how to google formulas and apply them to specific problems than have a bunch of formulas memorized. People naturally memorize things if they use them enough. Rather than having kids memorize specific formulas, I think it's more useful that they memorize the best way to find specific formulas (i.e. google, wolfram, etc). That's much more efficient.
I have a bunch of physics formulas memorized because I used them a lot. The ones I don't use a lot I just look up when they are needed. If I forget one, it's not a big deal. If I forget how to look up formulas (not sure how that would happen) I would be screwed.
The purpose of EDUCATION is to teach the student how to understand and think about the material.
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That's not the ultimate purpose. The ultimate purpose is to solve problems. Having a useful way to think about problems is a good tool for solving them. Afterall, that is the way we judge whether a particular way of thinking is valid or not, or whether someone really understands something. We judge understanding of a problem by whether someone can solve a similar problem. We judge whether a "way of thinking" is correct by whether it leads to correct solutions to problems.
Re:This is horrid (Score:4, Insightful)
The *ultimate* purpose of education in science is to solve problems we have no current solutions for. They are not solved by looking up the formula, but by developing your own formula based on your understanding of how things work.
I don't need to look up the formula that allows me to calculate the acceleration of a body of known mass when known force is applied to it, because I understand their relationship. I also understand the relationship between velocity, time, and acceleration, so I can create further formulas based on these two sets of relationships that might've not been obvious at first.
If I've just looked up the final formula, I've skipped the important steps that give me the underlying understanding of physics, which will allow me to create new formulas to solve new problems.
They'll work the bugs out (Score:4)
You're being replaced. The real question is how are you going to deal with it? What do we do when 95% of us are completely unnecessary?
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I've got that for Chemistry AND Physics. It's horrible. I've entirely missed problems because I couldn't figure out how it wanted the answer represented.
I mirror your sentiment exactly:
The teacher couldn't be bothered to assign and grade proper homework.
The kicker is that teachers who DO assign real homework have TA's or graders to grade the homework, all they actually grade are our tests.
Oh yea, and I have to pay extra for this online bullshit. It's required in a more in-depth way than textbooks (I literally can't pass the course without it) but isn't paid by the scho
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After reading over thirty of the posts, many worthy, I return to my first conclusion after reading yours: you said enough to cover the absurdity of what eDx is trying to do. The only possible useful thing I could see for it at first blush would be to act as a rough filter for very basic errors - and it'd still be making mistakes. At a time when there are plenty of sufficiently literate people un- or under-employed, let them grade essays at least as a first filter. One needn't be an expert on a subject t
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I graded undergrad essays of the children of privilege for well over a decade before progressing to their graduate essays.
Overall, I don't think automated grading is going to make a difference. Since most of the students don't care, I can't imagine there's much harm in having a grader who doesn't care. The notion of "caring" in higher education has been made obsolete, along with live lecturers. And I don't really blame the students gpt mpy vstomh, because under the stress of the huge debt that our system
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Your son learned something important: Rote learning is a thing of the past, and being able to know where to find the answer is more important than having it, and finding someone else to do the work for him is easier than doing it himself.
He's going to do great in a management position.
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I think that particular app, which I forget the name of, is very popular nowadays in Intro Physics classes. It's outrageously annoying. Hilariously, all the answers and solutions guide are available via a quick google search, something my classmates were quick to tell the rest of us.
The scary thing is, the people who make these books, who re-release the book every 6 months so you can't buy them used, are trying to push for the same kind of automation... of lectures. You'll have a "teacher," but they won't b
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My discrete math course did that - it had a bunch of web pages and tools you need to use to solve the problems. They never worked right at all.
OTOH, I can see the system being used in those massively online open courses (MOOCs) where a lecture can admit easily 3000+ or more students in a term. This seems like a way for them to have homework in the course and to do tests so it closes the loop. The prof then gets back a summary of how many people get a question wrong, etc.
So it has its uses and if we're goin
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My TA had that 35 years ago (Score:5, Funny)
Take one lab report for Fluid Mechanics, measure the thickness with a micrometer -- look up the grade on the curve.
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We already have that today, you can guess any of the AP/SAT/GRE essays' grades with phenomenal accuracy just by looking at how long they are:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
Re:My TA had that 35 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
News flash: when presented with an essay topic, smart people spend a few minutes planning and then proceed to write voluminously about the subject, because they are fluent writers. Dumb people start muddling along, lose track of where they are, and stop when they've stated (though not proved) their main point, because they're not. Fun game: ask a room full of people to write nonstop for five minutes on any topic(s) of their choosing, then compare word counts vs IQ/class grades/whatever.
If you're a HS student reading this (and I imagine there are a lot of you who are): practice writing. Practice writing. Practice writing. It's important. It's probably the most valuable skill you will ever acquire for dealing with people you don't meet with face-to-face. Bad writing is universally considered a sign of low intelligence. It takes a lot to overcome the negative impression that bad writing gives, and you often will not have the opportunity to try - when given a stack of 100 resumes for two positions, guess how the initial winnowing occurs? Toss anything on colored paper, anything written in a funny typeface, and anything with grammatical or spelling errors. I cringe today when I read some of the stuff that I wrote in HS, but it's grammatical and correctly spelled, even if the verbiage is ponderous (and occasionally verges on purple prose).
Re:My TA had that 35 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
IME, smart people write concisely and to the point of the prompt, while dumb people write voluminous, rambling, redundant, and unfocussed walls of text.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." --Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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Take one lab report for Fluid Mechanics, measure the thickness with a micrometer -- look up the grade on the curve.
I guess that beats throwing them down a flight of ten stairs twice.
Have a computer write your submission too (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems like it's a small step from this to having computer algorithms that automatically write your paper for you too - then you can let it go through thousands of submit-edit-submit cycles until the scoring computer gives you a perfect score.
Kind of like the guys that came up with software to generate nonsense scientific papers and actually had a few accepted [wikipedia.org] at conferences and journals.
Re:Have a computer write your submission too (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how these would do:
the postmodernism generator http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ [elsewhere.org]
the math paper generator http://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/ [thatsmathematics.com]
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Much of modern finance actually works this way. Press releases about mergers and such are written by computer to be read by computer and fed into algorithmic trading. The relationship to nonsense is left as an exercise for the student's computer.
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Oh, that's it! I was wondering why I don't understand it, but it's actually not in a human readable format, it just disguises as English.
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One problem with teachers grading papers in today world is that you have no idea if the work is original. Reports for all the common topics are all over the place, and it is easy to adjust and mix and match so the common tools will only catch the laziest students. Solution to textbook problems are all over the place as well. The is why any decent science or math teacher will give computer generated tests. A
Sample Admittance Essay (Score:5, Funny)
Congratulations, you have been admitted... (Score:3, Funny)
And you have been awarded 2500 extra HP.
feedback... (Score:5, Insightful)
``Your grade is C. To improve your grade in the future, you need to do the following:
use 25-30 words per sentence; include more words from the wordnet entry for the topic of your essay; avoid simplistic or run-on sentences as measured by number of noun and verb phrases detected by our proprietary NLP tokenizer.
As a helpful reminder, our preparatory guides are available as a subscription service and include 100 practice submissions per week; only $29.95 per month."
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Good point.
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If their use was kept secret, systems like this would likely perform well most of the time; the correlations these systems are based on are probably pretty steady.
Once students get any information about the system, however, it's doomed - and in any case it's unlikely the system will give real, useful assistance in improving skills beyond what you'd get from a grammar checker.
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You're being overly generous. Everything you describe after "Beyond that" is beyond the state-of-the-art in NLP to do consistently.
Grading is about feedback (Score:5, Insightful)
Grading is not, or should not be, about the grade, it should be about the feedback that the lecturer gives to the student. Even if the computer can grade an essay well (which I remain to be convinced of, although I am sure I will soon have the chance to test it for myself), there is no claim made about the computer giving useful advice to the student. Can a computer explain how to refine a research question or structure an argument? Sadly, many lecturers don't in fact give good feedback, but we should be looking for ways to enable lecturers to give better feedback, not accepting poor feedback as the norm.
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Since being able to grade well requires the ability to make the exact same distinctions required to identify the feedback that would need to be given, I would be very surprised if software that could do one could not also do the other.
I'd also be surprised if current software was
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Grading is not, or should not be, about the grade, it should be about the feedback that the lecturer gives to the student.
Not always: there are two types of assessment [learnalberta.ca]. Formative assessment where the aim is to let the student know what they understand and what they need to work on. This is what you describe. There is also Summative Assessment where the aim to to assess what the student actually knows. Usually I try to get some of both - for example although a midterm is mainly aimed and finding out how much the students have learnt I'll also spend a lecture to go through the exam to give detailed solutions and feedback to stu
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I suspect that these automatic graders would give the same grade to an essay if all the sentences were rearranged, or if the nouns were randomly switched around.
For example, the previous sentence might receive the same grade as this one:
Sentences suspect that these automatic nouns would give the same essay to a grade if all the graders were rearranged, or if I were randomly switched around.
In my defense, I fixed the articles to make the rearranged sentence conventional in terms of article use. But that c
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New market for SEO companies (Score:2)
They had these back in 1991 too (Score:4, Interesting)
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While I am rather skeptical about the quality of AI essay grading, I'd be very surprised if software in this area hasn't advanced since 1991. I mean, software in most other domains certainly has.
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Some Things Never Change (Score:4, Insightful)
Every era has its snake-oil salesmen and their marks. Sadly, in this case it will not be the customers who suffer, but their hapless students.
Grades grammar not content. A.I. not ready yet. (Score:5, Informative)
Perelman gives an example of how you can get a high score. The most interesting feature of the algorithm is that it doesn’t care about substance or even truth. It will ignore such trivialities as saying that the war of 1812 began in 1945, provided you say it grammatically. The substance of an argument doesn’t matter, he said, as long as it looks to the computer as if it’s nicely argued.
For a question asking students to discuss why college costs are so high, Mr. Perelman wrote that the No. 1 reason is excessive pay for greedy teaching assistants. “The average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents,” he wrote. “In addition, they often receive a plethora of extra benefits such as private jets, vacations in the south seas, starring roles in motion pictures.”
E-Rater gave him a [top score of] 6. He tossed in a line from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” just to see if he could get away with it. He could."
http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2012/05/03/how-to-fool-a-computer-grader/ [freethoughtblogs.com]
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So all you really need is x (where x matches the length of the assignment) occurrences of the word buffalo, with the first one capitalized and the last followed by a period. A grammatically perfect sentence, with the maximum possible length results.
The Actual "Essay" (Score:4, Informative)
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Get ready to see SEO (Submission Engine Optimisation) specialists cropping up and making a fortune off lazy students.
Or should that be ESO (Essay Submission Optimisation)
And new websites such as LOLEssays where you can see examples of the most ridiculous essays people actually got top marks for.
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The point of that sentence is that it is obviously counterfactual, yet E-Rater gave him a top score for the insightful essay in which it was contained.
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A perfectly normal, human mistake. Now you understand the sarcasm. Had the computer been able to fact check, well, let's imagine its reaction.
Any computer can be beat (Score:2)
Any algorithm can be beat
The all you have to do is fill your paper full of the right keywords
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Score: 0 out of 6.
This won't last (Score:2)
free time? (Score:2)
There are probably at least several good jabs to make at this so I'll try to just address the best one.
First thing that comes to my mind is 'free them up to do what?" Education is adding more and more distance between the student and the teacher without throwing this into the mix. In a perfect world, teachers would be there to teach and that's it. But it's become more a problem
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That would be nice. But, of course, back in those days a person like me wouldn't have had a shot at higher education, much less a Ph.D. No, I'd probably be on my way to black lung or some similar ailment by now, working in mines acquired by some guy who could afford to send his kids to a low student-to-teach ratio private school. The democratization of education has its costs as well as its benefits.
Free professors for other activities (Score:2)
Would you like fries with that?
Seriously though I don't think writing to what an algorithm wants is a bad thing if the algorithm wants the right stuff.
It's not as if students don't write to the algorithm the professor uses even now. The only difference is where the algorithm is stored and how flexible it is.
That is Nothing.. (Score:2)
At my university we have AI that continually checks our essays as we write them. It even points out the specific mistakes, gives suggestions to fix them, and allows us to rewrite that section of the essay.
We call this advanced AI MS Word.
Automated Grading AKA Spellcheck??? (Score:2)
So basically they feed the essay into Google spellchecker and count the number of underlined words?
Rewrite the test? (Score:2)
How many times?
I can envision an essay writing 'bot making multiple submissions with some AI to optimize subsequent submissions based on the .
I know it sounds like an awful lot of effort to build, but its time better spent than writing a two page essay on Dickens, IMO.
That BS again (Score:2)
This is now the n-th time something like this has been on /.
The answer is still the same: This is a very bad idea. Students will learn how to game the software instead of how to write well. No software can grade whether the reasoning is sound, the images vivid, the prose well readable. But what students will learn is that writing essays is not important, after all it is not even worth bothering a human being to read and grade.
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Now assume you grow up somewhere where the teachers can't read and write proper English. We can call this place "public school in a non-educated community unless you're lucky." This kind of thing could be useful. The only problem is that people would not be smart enough to correct it, but it might still raise the bar.
"Freeing professors for other tasks"? (Score:3)
Any professors I've ever known or been taught by had their grad students doing the grading, anyhow.
Besides, what exactly are the professors being "freed up" for? Isn't their JOB to TEACH?
Oh, yeah, I'm thinking old school. Nowadays a professor's job is to find corporate grants...
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Depends on the school. Good, small undergrad schools use little or no TA grading.
Re:"Freeing professors for other tasks"? (Score:4, Informative)
Good for the filler / big lecture classes t online (Score:2)
Good for the filler / big lecture classes to move to a full online / test only setting and maybe they can pass on the lower costs to the students.
It may just lead to people to gameing the system but what does that give them? More time to work on there core classes?? I think that it is better to say do the min to pass art history so I have the time to work on the classes I want to work on.
Where can I find more information on this? (Score:3)
I read the article and went to edX. At edX I signed up; but, I can not find out about this system. Quite Frankly, I am a teacher and I need my students to be writing more; however, I do not have the time to grade all of their papers so I have been assigning more objective homework that I would like.
A system like this may work as a first pass filter to do the bulk of the grading, allowing me to focus on identifying common problems and developing lessons based on common errors rather than tying myself down with a huge stack of papers. This would also benefit the students by providing them with more consistent grading and feedback.
This may not be what I go with; but, I would like to have a look at it. That takes me back to my question, can anyone point me to somewhere that I can get more information on this?
Needed: better teachers (Score:2)
I read the article and went to edX. At edX I signed up; (semicolon should be a comma) but, (misplaced comma) I can not (should be "cannot") find out about this system. Quite Frankly,(lower case!) I am a teacher and I need my students to be writing more; (Run-on sentence. Use a period.) however, I do not have the time to grade all of their papers (comma here) so I have been assigning more objective homework that I would like.
Grade: D
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If I really care about what I am typing, I type it in word first. My students know I am the worlds worst typist when I type on the overhead; that is why I make an effort to use class material that I have written in advance. If I take the time to write well, which I am definitely not doing now, I can write, and have written, material suitable for publication
I will also add that I am a business teacher, I wrote well enough to make it through an MBA program (oddly enough, I was even called on to help edit for
side effect of big classes. also Multiple choice (Score:2)
side effect of big classes. also can drop tests down to a Multiple hidden choice test. It's like a Multiple choice test without knowing what the choices are.
smaller classes and team based work maybe even apprenticeships / more of a tech / trades schools level testing where it's more about real skills and not about test cramming taken to the next level where you now just need to know the buzz words.
Record High Student Debt Load (Score:2)
The policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed (Score:2)
aka, "your lazy bum grades me with a computer, my lazy bum lets a computer write one".
How long until such a system is being gamed? Quite frankly, I wouldn't be too surprised if within weeks, students notice what the computer "wants" to "read" and write their essays accordingly.
Not that it would change too much from today, where you learn what your professor wants to read and write for your audience...
Essay grading machines have been in use for years (Score:4, Interesting)
The rating is also done by humans. It works well in practice and ensures that essays are graded fairly. If there is a significant discrepancy between the two ratings for a essay, that essay is examined further by another specialist. It prevents students from being victims of someone having a bad day at the office, and also does not encourage writing an essay to beat a machine.
The significance of the EDX news is not the concept of automated grading, it is that that such software is now free and opensource.
Looking to the future (Score:2)
with the prevalence of advertising and corporations dominating everything, you can be sure that soon the answer to all questions will be "Pepsi"
http://homepage.smc.edu/nestler_andrew/pepsi.jpg [smc.edu]
Computers (Score:2)
I've probably been in this longer than anyone - in 1986 I was working with a teacher (High School Biology) who had networked C-64s in his classroom. Of course back then the questions were all multiple choice (we couldn't give it enough intelligence to evaluate expressions), and yes he did the semester tests himself.
If used properly, there is nothing especially wrong with doing assignments or quizzes on computer. That being said, you know there is going to be a tendency to misuse them. They'll assign more wo
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The same as what they get hired and paid for now, research.
You notice the common statement is "publish or perish" not "educate or expire", right?
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I thought professors were hired to... you know... teach stuff.
If a professor isn't actually giving feedback to the students about their performance, then a person might as well just try to learn everything from books and not bother with classes at all.
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Teach more students? Current university education certainly does not scale very well.
Re:AI has not come far enough for this (Score:5, Interesting)
Computers suck at even the most basic grammar checking. I once decided to try a bunch of online grammar checkers to see if they would be useful at providing a sanity check for my novels. I concluded that they report so many bogus mistakes that it simply wasn't practical to use their output at all. To test them, I fed them a block of content, some with intentional errors that the grammar checker should have caught, others with deliberately (or accidentally) tricky bits that should not have produced any errors.
And so on. Heck, my phone doesn't even know the difference between "its" and "it's" and tries to auto-correct me into looking like I failed first grade English. And these folks expect me to believe that computers can feasibly help students learn to write better papers? Give me a break. Maybe in thirty to fifty years (*) we'll get there, but....
* Which many grammar checkers would probably suggest changing to "thirty-two fifty".
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Maybe in thirty to fifty years (*) we'll get there, but....
We thought we'd be there in 10 years. That was 1984. No, not the book, the year that Cyc was started.
So, it's already been almost 30 years since we first thought we'd be there. I'm sure we'll look at this problem again in another 30 years and think again that we'll be there really soon now.
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I expect all three of them would fail their exam. Oops, I started a sentence with "And".
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According to Merriam Webster, yes, you can. That has been common English usage for at least as long as I've been alive.
Oxford English Dictionary agrees (#2), and uses the same example. So does Random House. And so on. So maybe you can't climb down something, but I hope your house never catches on fire, or else you're in serious trouble.
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The second part is a nominative absolute [wikipedia.org] not a clause, so no, the comma is correct. That said, the construction is unusual enough that I've never been taught it in any English class, and I had to look it up just to figure out what it was called.
Perhaps the most famous example of this construction appears in the U.S. Bill of Rights (2nd amendment).
also short answers?? How does it know the answer? (Score:2)
also short answers?? How does it know the answer? and what if there is more then 1 answer / a wide range of part answers.
Also what about questions on the level of how do you do X in X os and you fail as the way you put down to get to control panel is not the way the gradeing software is looking for.
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Well, yeah, research, which is what they mostly get paid for. (Though, really, at many universities, the people who this is freeing up to do more of the primary focus—again, research—is likely to be more often graduate students working as graders/TAs, not professors.)
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What other tasks? The only task of the professor is to teach students. Anyway, this is probably at least third submission about automated grading systems over last 6 months, and it really is getting tired.
To any sane person it is obvious that the idea is retarded, so why do we keep discussing it?
Really? The last time I checked, no one got denied tenure for poor teaching. The faculty are there to bring money to the university - if they manage to teach well, that is an added bonus. However, they could be great teachers (I've known a few) who get fired because they didn't bring in hundred-thousand/million dollar grants every year of their assistant professorship.
While the idea is retarded, you seem to be missing the danger. When the university/faculty see the benefits of doing this, they will do it