This frightens me, to my core. The style of writing that garners top scores from a robo-grader is the style of writing I try to eliminate from my students repertoire: lengthy, inaccurate, complicated, and verbose. I know colleges are now using robo-graders in large, introductory classes. This means that ASP and legal writing will be dealing with more remedial writing challenges, as students learn to write for robo-graders.
Here are some of the highlights of robo-grading that draw my ire:
- Favoring longer sentences, when shorter sentences would be more direct.
- Giving points for length, regardless of what is written.
- Preferring "gargantuan" words ("egregious") to simple phrasing (it was wrong).
- Facts can be wrong, as long as the facts are a part of a well-structured sentence. “E-Rater is not designed to be a fact checker,” said Paul Deane, a principal research scientist.
——————————————————————————————————————————-
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/education/robo-readers-used-to-grade-test-essays.html
Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously
Computers are fast when it comes to grading test essays, but they can be fooled.
(RCF)
