GRADING: Computer essay grading is not truly that effective.
By Kate Doak, Staff Writer
Most students have complained about a grade received on an essay and demanded an explanation from his or her teacher. What if, however, there were no teacher? What if the grader of the essay did not have the ability to think or reason at all, let alone provide an explanation of a student’s thoughts? Programmers from Harvard and MIT think a computer grading system like this one could be revolutionary in helping students learn to write, but honestly, this new system is going to do more harm than help.
EdX, a non-profit enterprise founded by the two educational institutions, has recently introduced the new grading system and plans to make it a free tool for any school to use. While computer grading systems for multiple choice tests and checking simple grammar and spelling mistakes in essays are common, actually using an automated grading system to check content is causing quite a stir. The hope is that this type of grading will help students learn faster by receiving their grades almost instantly and being able to rewrite them over and over to help improve their scores as well as give teachers more time for other tasks. Unfortunately not many people want this “help” to begin with.
Students themselves will not benefit all that much, if at all, from a switch to computer grading. Writing itself is a very complex skill, developed through experience, practice and communication with other people. In a person’s school years, learning through communication with teachers is essential. Students need detailed explanations of their mistakes, not just the knowledge of them. Students also need to feel confident in the grade they receive. So if the computer cannot explain the grade and help the student improve, how can the student be confident that he or she was graded fairly? Besides that, computer grading could actually make students care less about writing essays. If no one cares enough to take the time to read it, why should a student care enough to take the hours, or even days, necessary to compose a quality essay? Since there are no studies proving the effectiveness of the new system, there really aren’t any positives for students.
What about teachers, then? Initially, the developers of the program stated that they wanted to help teachers and professors by assuming the responsibility of grading essays to free them for other aspects of their job. Then, of course, they said that they wanted to use this new technology to eliminate the high costs of human graders all together. It is odd that you want to help someone by getting rid of him. By taking the time to grade essays, teachers learn the needs of their students and become better equipped to teach them the needed material. Besides that, computers simply cannot compare to human teachers. Computers are not capable of critical thinking; they can only identify the most objective, “surface” features of an essay including grammar, spelling and vocabulary by the length of words and the number of different words included. The systems can also be “gamed,” or tricked, because they are poor at working with language.
So, essentially, nothing good comes out of switching to computerized grading systems. Why try to make an improvement on something that already works, and has worked for generations?