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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 hig
by 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 agoJust 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 agoThat 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 agoIt 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...
- stakhanov 8y agoYou're totally missing the point. The existence of cheating strategies implies that there's something wrong. The thing that's wrong is not the cheating. What's wrong is that when an examiner has the power to severely diminish a student's prospects for future educational and career development, you would expect that examiner to be someone whose academic standing is way in advance of the student's, not someone whose intelligence is short of human.
- albntomat0 8y agoAdversarial ML where the attack has to fit in the mind of the test taker and iteration is slow is an interesting problem. I can't say that I trust the original humans grading thousands of SAT essays prior to any ML assistance though.
- ycombobreaker 8y ago> I can't say that I trust the original humans grading thousands of SAT essays prior to any ML assistance though. I think you are underestimating human beings here. Sure humans would make errors, but literacy and reading comprehension are skills that all of the graders would have. If ML solutions are not recognizing obvious repetition, markov-chain text, excessive excerpts/quotations, or bbb bbbb bbbbbbb bbb bb; then it is likely that they are grading on an entirely different level of interpretation below the humans.
- albntomat0 8y agoI was unclear in my previous comment. Humans are fine with recognizing gibberish answers, but I'm skeptical of the ability to differentiate great writing from simple decent.
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoThat's fine for this purpose because even the most exclusive universities can't really expect great writing as a precondition for admission. These AIs can't even distinguish decent writing from complete gibberish.