5 ms·

This seems easy to game, especially if you have any insight into the model behind the grading. I doubt that those running it will release any specifics, but wit

This seems easy to game, especially if you have any insight into the model behind the grading. I doubt that those running it will release any specifics, but with a large industry[0] behind test prep, general guidance on how to beat the system will be available for those who can pay for it. That said, the SAT writing section was equally silly when graded by humans. All of the examples of what a good score looked like (per when I took it ~10 years ago) were highly formulaic, rewarding those who invested in played the game. [0]: https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-the-SAT-test-prep-market https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-the-SAT-test-prep-market

aikinai 8y ago
This reminds me of the Versant test, which is a computer-graded test of speaking ability in various languages. A friend of mind had to take it and I quickly realized it was both inaccurate and highly gameable. The full story is that my friend was very fluent in English (though still far from native) but did very poorly twice. I spent some time reading the company's PR and an interview with the founder and realized that they weren't even trying to grade content, only fluency. So I advised my friend to just speak fast and constantly, even if it didn't make sense. If your story goes down a dead end, or you realize your last verb didn't match this object, don't pause, don't go back, just keep the words coming out. It worked perfectly and she aced it the third time.
askvictor 8y ago
If it possible to replicate the grades (i.e. different teachers give the same work the same mark) then it's possible to write rules for the grades. If it's possible to write rules, it eventually gets possible to automate it. In either case it's possible to game the system if you know the rules (as you've said). The underlying problem is high-stakes testing. Remove that, and you remove the need for formulaic testing, and remove the incentive to game the testing. I'm not suggesting that means dropping rigor and consistency from the curriculum - there are other ways to achieve those, and they involve human effort i.e. talking to people. Which costs time and money.
- albntomat0 8y ago
  Just because humans can replicate it does not mean that the rules can be expressed in any useful way. Plenty of tasks that replicate easily across humans (such as driving) currently are not automated. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but it definitely is non-trivial. If the rules become good enough at capturing good writing, then "gaming" them is the same as producing good writing!
zawerf 8y ago
If you read the article it actually goes into a lot of fun details on how it is already being gamed. GAN techniques where you just generate garbage to get a high score: > Called the Babel ("Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language") Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders. "History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation." Along with human examples: > One year, she says, a student who wrote a whole page of the letter "b" ended up with a good score. Other students have figured out that they could do well writing one really good paragraph and just copying that four times to make a five-paragraph essay that scores well. Others have pulled one over on the computer by padding their essays with long quotes from the text they're supposed to analyze, or from the question they're supposed to answer. This whole thing is a nice case study for adversarial machine learning.
- tomtimtall 8y ago
  Just because the essays are auto graded doesn’t mean no human will ever see them. It takes far far longer to grade an essay than it does to skim 3 sentences randomly and confirm that it’s bullshit and get the student expelled for attempting to cheat.
  - Drakim 8y ago
    That will stop people from just copy-pasting one statement over and over again. But, it will still create a meta game of trying to write machine learning likable texts as opposed to good texts.
    - macNchz 8y ago
      It was already a bit of a game in 2005 when I took the ‘new’ SAT which included an essay component. Research from the same professor Perelman quoted in this article had shown that longer essays were graded more favorably (by overworked humans I believe), so I made sure to fill the whole space at the expense of quality writing, and got a perfect score. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/sat-essay-test-rewards-length-and-ignores-errors.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/sat-essay-te...

aikinai 8y ago

This reminds me of the Versant test, which is a computer-graded test of speaking ability in various languages. A friend of mind had to take it and I quickly realized it was both inaccurate and highly gameable. The full story is that my friend was very fluent in English (though still far from native) but did very poorly twice. I spent some time reading the company's PR and an interview with the founder and realized that they weren't even trying to grade content, only fluency. So I advised my friend to just speak fast and constantly, even if it didn't make sense. If your story goes down a dead end, or you realize your last verb didn't match this object, don't pause, don't go back, just keep the words coming out. It worked perfectly and she aced it the third time.

askvictor 8y ago

If it possible to replicate the grades (i.e. different teachers give the same work the same mark) then it's possible to write rules for the grades. If it's possible to write rules, it eventually gets possible to automate it. In either case it's possible to game the system if you know the rules (as you've said). The underlying problem is high-stakes testing. Remove that, and you remove the need for formulaic testing, and remove the incentive to game the testing. I'm not suggesting that means dropping rigor and consistency from the curriculum - there are other ways to achieve those, and they involve human effort i.e. talking to people. Which costs time and money.

albntomat0 8y ago
Just because humans can replicate it does not mean that the rules can be expressed in any useful way. Plenty of tasks that replicate easily across humans (such as driving) currently are not automated. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but it definitely is non-trivial. If the rules become good enough at capturing good writing, then "gaming" them is the same as producing good writing!

zawerf 8y ago

If you read the article it actually goes into a lot of fun details on how it is already being gamed. GAN techniques where you just generate garbage to get a high score: > Called the Babel ("Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language") Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders. "History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation." Along with human examples: > One year, she says, a student who wrote a whole page of the letter "b" ended up with a good score. Other students have figured out that they could do well writing one really good paragraph and just copying that four times to make a five-paragraph essay that scores well. Others have pulled one over on the computer by padding their essays with long quotes from the text they're supposed to analyze, or from the question they're supposed to answer. This whole thing is a nice case study for adversarial machine learning.

tomtimtall 8y ago
Just because the essays are auto graded doesn’t mean no human will ever see them. It takes far far longer to grade an essay than it does to skim 3 sentences randomly and confirm that it’s bullshit and get the student expelled for attempting to cheat.
- Drakim 8y ago
  That will stop people from just copy-pasting one statement over and over again. But, it will still create a meta game of trying to write machine learning likable texts as opposed to good texts.
  - macNchz 8y ago
    It was already a bit of a game in 2005 when I took the ‘new’ SAT which included an essay component. Research from the same professor Perelman quoted in this article had shown that longer essays were graded more favorably (by overworked humans I believe), so I made sure to fill the whole space at the expense of quality writing, and got a perfect score. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/sat-essay-test-rewards-length-and-ignores-errors.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/sat-essay-te...