The Record (Hackensack, N.J.)
How devastating would it be to find these comments on your latest assignment in Composition 101?
"Your essay does not coherently focus or communicate your ideas; is organized very weakly or doesn't develop ideas enough; generalizes and does not provide examples or support to make your points clear."
Now imagine getting that criticism from a computer.
Demoralizing? How about dehumanizing? Well, too bad. It's already happening.
Some schools and universities are now using software programs that evaluate writing—not just spelling and grammar, but content, structure, even tone. Educators find the technology helpful to score standardized tests, grade final exams, and give students instant feedback on their writing.
The essay portion of the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), the admissions exam required by business schools, is now graded by a human and a computer, with the two scores averaged. At Camden County College in New Jersey, the same technology, known as "e-rater," helps the English department faculty wade through the thousands of final exam essays written each semester for Composition I and II. The e-rater is one of two graders of the final exam.
In Boulder, Colorado, sixth-grade teachers are using another computer program, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, to help students refine their compositions before handing them in to the teacher for a grade.
"I don't believe a program like this will ever replace a teacher, and I don't believe that's the intent of it, either," said Ronald Lamb, one of the Boulder teachers using the technology. "I think the intention is to give kids much more feedback, and much more immediate feedback, than a teacher could provide to a class of 20 or 30 students."
Human Input
The technology has yet to win over academics such as William C. Dowling, an English professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He believes that evaluating a piece of writing is too subtle a task for a machine.
"To recognize various kinds of good writing, you're going to encounter examples that the machine can't deal with, that the grader has to be thinking to recognize. You need a grader that can think," said Dowling, a linguistics expert.
The companies that market the new computer programs don't claim their products can think. But the creators say that by using concepts such as "natural language processing" and "latent semantic analysis," their programs agree with human graders as often as—and sometimes more often than—two human graders agree with each other.
