If you apply to study at the University of Cambridge (UK, not Boston), an actual faculty member (not a teaching assistant or anything like that) of the Universi

If you apply to study at the University of Cambridge (UK, not Boston), an actual faculty member (not a teaching assistant or anything like that) of the University of Cambridge (not some lesser institution) will take the time to sit down with you for an extended period of time for an interview, even for undergraduates (for graduates, it goes without saying). That courtesy is extended to a boatload of applicants who make that final stage, and the stages before that certainly don't involve robo-grading. In the U.S., you take the SAT or GRE or whatever which gets graded by a mechanical turk or even an actual machine. And even the good colleges don't have the good sense to ignore the thing (the exception being MIT, at least back when I applied there, where stating your GRE score was optional when you applied as a grad). So a less than astronomical score will immediately make it impossible to get into any decent college. That system is f*cked up. For me that meant that the only university that would have me also happened to be the university that routinely scores first or second place in international university rankings, that university being Cambridge. And I didn't get a single offer from the US because of a bad GRE score. After getting my doctorate in NLP there, I can attest to how fucked up the idea actually is, that you can score essays using NLP.