Computers Could Grade Essay Tests Better Than Profs 323
An anonymous reader writes "Robot essay graders could be the answer to grade inflation. New software being tested turns over the task of grading to computers — this article has an interactive demo of the software. One professor says the computer is far fairer than human graders, who get tired and become inconsistent, or play favorites."
Re:Wasn't Aware (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure no program is capable of this (and I've got a PhD in natural language processing). They might be able to check for a couple of easily scored factors, such as number of words, and consistency between paragraphs, but I'm pretty sure that there is no program that could distinguish between an essay and the same essay messed up to base reasoning on false assumptions. I think someone left out a pretty important assumption: such programs might be able to score fairer (meaning: with less bias!), provided the students did their best.