Monday, June 11, 2012

The Contemplative Cynic Sends This In: "The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay."

Skip Sterling
for NYTimes.
As a professor and a parent, I have long dreamed of finding a software program that helps every student learn to write well. It would serve as a kind of tireless instructor, flagging grammatical, punctuation or word-use problems, but also showing the way to greater concision and clarity.

Now, unexpectedly, the desire to make the grading of tests less labor-intensive may be moving my dream closer to reality.

The standardized tests administered by the states at the end of the school year typically have an essay-writing component, requiring the hiring of humans to grade them one by one. This spring, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition to see how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders. The winners were announced last month — and the predictive algorithms were eerily accurate.

3 comments:

  1. BuckyJune 11, 2012 at 9:02 PM

    How crazy is this sentence: "Software sharply lowers the cost of scoring those essays — a matter of great importance because states have begun to toss essay evaluation to the wayside."

    So we no longer can do essay evaluations because everyone has to study for a mystical test written by for profit corporations...but don't worry, now a computer can grade those essays, so the testing companies can have a new test product to sell! (Just as long as the essays are pointless and rote: think which lemonade stand is best).

    Maybe we should just embrace it though. Why not let go of the idea writing should be for the purpose of communicating to another human being when we will be getting all of our cognitive, emotional and sexual needs from a machine soon anyway?

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  2. Vog3lfr3iJune 12, 2012 at 3:56 AM

    "Student laptops don’t yet have the tireless virtual writing instructor installed. But improved statistical modeling brings that happy day closer."

    So, one should soon be able to cut and paste from Google results, and let the software correct the grammar.

    As Bucky says, be honest and drop any sort of literacy requirement instead of debasing it this way.

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  3. The Contemplative CynicJune 12, 2012 at 3:59 PM

    Exactly: what, specifically, is it that we're teaching students to do with writing? Is it that we now simply want them to learn formulaic prose that makes little to no sense? Is it that we want them to stop learning how to proofread their own work (then again, they already DON'T do this).

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