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:Playing favorites (Score:5, Insightful)
The best student. Duh.
Fairer vs. Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the (comparatively much easier) tasks of spelling and grammar checking result in a fairly steady stream of mistakes from computer systems. I can't exactly summon much optimism for the likely outcome of such a system trying to distinguish between a paper with a well supported thesis and a paper that contains some declarative statements, a few quotations, and the word "therefore" at intervals.
On the plus side, it should be pretty trivial to get the machines to do the same lousy job without the slightest consideration of the student's name/status/cuteness/willingness to flatter the professor; but what use is purely objective execution of lousy work?
Re:Play favorites? I believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why most people don't take literary analysis seriously. There is a real human being who took the pain to write a 400-page long book. Presumably, he wanted to convey *something*. But apparently, we have to act as if the book came down from heaven and we can't try to discover what the author wanted to say?
The worst manifestation of this is when some literary theorists seem to argue that *even the author* cannot interpret what he wrote better than anyone else. He's just another reader!
This sounds ridiculous to me. Even if the author writes an essay saying "this is what I meant when I wrote this", we're supposed to ignore that and simply focus on the words of the work because this is all that matters in literary criticism?
Re:After school (Score:1, Insightful)
Ideally studying at a university isn't an exercise in delivering to spec. I'm not paying to produce a product for other people. I get paid to produce products for other people.
Eh, what the hell do I know. I stopped taking classes after I couldn't come up with a good way to echo the feminist sentiment that all women really do have penis envy and that I'm so lucky to have been born a guy without completely imploding. Somehow a body that causes you pain and discomfort one month out of the week is worse than a body that causes you pain and discomfort 12 times a day without ever letting up, and having a period is the equivalent of being raped. Oh, and long hair is the equivalent of being raped. So is putting on make up. In fact, just being female is like being continuously raped. At least that's all I learned in college.
Anyone whose knee jerks and mods me troll is actually modding feminism troll.
Re:Play favorites? I believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a bit of a strawman. In high school English, it was explained to us as: humans write literature, and sometimes they have something to say. This doesn't mean that they are the final word on what broader meaning their work has, but it does mean they have a deep insight into it. So no, don't ignore authors, but don't expect appeals to their authority to be viewed as anything but a fallacy in and of itself.
Or put another way: Read Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" (http://www.iment.com/maida/poetry/frost.htm#stopping), (it's short). The dominant interpretation of this poem is that it is an allegory of old age and death. Frost, however, insisted that this poem was about nothing more than taking a ride through a wood on a snowy evening. Who's right? It's not an either/or. In literary analysis there are right interpretation*s* and wrong interpretations, but it's not like there's just one right answer.
Or at least that's what I remember from my last literary analysis class taken, which was in high school many years ago.
Re:Play favorites? I believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember reading a quote from Tom Stoppard (playwright for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, among others), in which he basically said that writing is like packing a bag that he later takes to the airport. The people at the airport opt to inspect his bag and they start finding all sorts of things that he didn't remember putting in the bag, but he can't deny that they are there.
There is an argument to be made that we should take art as it was intended, but oftentimes the benefit of something is other than what was intended (case in point: movies that are so bad they're good), so there shouldn't be a reason why we deny that line of thinking as well. That said, there should be a limit. Some people, particularly the sort of liberal arts folks we all love to lampoon, try to insert their own things into the bag, rather than finding things that were legitimately there in the first place. But if they're simply discovering additional, yet unintended, depth to a classic piece of literature that can help us appreciate it better? Yeah, I see no problem with that. It may be unintended, but that doesn't mean it's not there. Even so, we shouldn't ascribe more meaning to it than it's due.