![]() “It’s inevitable,” he said, that robo-graders will soon take over. Do they score papers better than graduate students, writing instructors, and those individuals hired by testing companies to pour through the written portions of standardized exams do? “The reality is, humans are not very good at doing this,” Steve Graham, a Vanderbilt University professor who has researched essay grading techniques tells Reuters. Robot graders don’t give feedback they simply score. Grading essays is also incredibly grueling intellectually, I’d argue, as giving meaningful feedback on student writing (and by extension on student thinking) is hard work. That makes the move to robot graders one of efficiency, time- and cost-savings. Grading essays – whether in comp or in other writing-heavy classes – is incredibly time-consuming. Writing underlies all that happens in a literature department, of course, (in all disciplines, really) but the labor associated with teaching composition has never been highly valued.Īnd oh, the labor. ![]() “Move on” and “move up.” In the English Department hierarchy, composition sits at the very bottom, below even the Film Studies and Folklore classes. To be eligible for this teaching assignment, one must complete a year long series of classes that offer training in teaching composition.īut after a year or two doing so, as graduate students complete their coursework and passes their qualifying exams, they move on to teach literature classes. ![]() ![]() WR121 is often the first teaching gig that English and Comparative Literature graduate students are given by the university. It is possible to “test out” of the former with a high enough score on the SAT or AP exam, but that hardly meant that students who went straight into WR122 were skilled or sophisticated writers.Īt the UO, composition classes are taught primarily by Graduate Teaching Fellows, although the university does employ some writing instructors (full- and part-time) as well. Two terms of College Composition are required of all undergraduates at all the public universities in the state: WR121 and WR122. I taught College Composition at the University of Oregon for two years. And, the more we can use essays to assess what students have learned, the greater the likelihood they’ll master important academic content, critical thinking, and effective communication.” II. “This demonstration of rapid and accurate automated essay scoring will encourage states to include more writing in their state assessments. “Better tests support better learning,” according to the foundation’s Education Program Director Barbara Chow. The study coincides with a competition hosted on Kaggle and sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation, which data scientists are challenged with developing the best algorithm to automatically grade student essays. “The demonstration showed conclusively that automated essay scoring systems are fast, accurate, and cost effective,” says Tom Vander Ark, managing partner at the investment firm Learn Capital, in a press release touting the study’s results. They found that “overall, automated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended-response writing items with equal performance for both source-based and traditional writing genre.” ( PDF). The researchers examined some 22,000 essays that were administered to junior and high school level students as part of their states’ standardized testing process, comparing the grades given by human graders and those given by automated grading software. ![]() That’s the conclusion of a study conducted by University of Akron's Dean of the College of Education Mark Shermis and Kaggle data scientist Ben Hamner. Robot essay graders – they grade just the same as human ones. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” – Mario Savo I. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious-makes you so sick at heart-that you can’t take part. ![]()
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