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Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoUnlike a multiple choice test where the primary audience is automated graders, the primary audience for an essay is other humans. If even Google and Facebook with their billions of dollars and billions of posts worth of data, still cannot always understand the intent and purpose of written content, what hope do these algorithms have? If it is cost-prohibitive for every essay to be graded by humans, then they should be dropped from the tests. Otherwise, we are missing the whole point of essays which is to communicate effectively with another human, not just match certain text patterns.
- saagarjha 7y ago> If it is cost-prohibitive for every essay to be graded by humans, then they should be dropped from the tests. Apparently it is. But everyone still wants writing to be assessed…
- risubramanian 7y agoThe SAT dropped the writing section a few years ago, and many schools don't care about the GRE writing score.
- hnburnsy 7y agoThey did drop the writing but replaced it with an optional essay. Most upper tier schools require applicants to take the essay.
- ta8347 7y agoHarvard, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and many other schools do NOT require applicants to take the SAT essay.
- lonelappde 7y agoBecause they prefer an essay you can buy from a college applications consultant.
- saagarjha 7y agoDo you know anyone who has gotten in without taking the SAT essay?
- hanniabu 7y agoFinally, but then none of these new test takers will know what it feels like to get near perfect scores on the other sections of the test but then completely bomb the written portion and ruin your overall score.
- anigbrowl 7y agoIf it is cost-prohibitive then then maybe we should adjust the economic model, not abandon the measurement.
- Spivak 7y agoI mean that's what the automated grading systems are trying to do but it seems like people don't like them very much.
- rocqua 7y agoSure, have less essay test questions, and start grading them for content not form. If you want to grade on form to test the ability to write correct rather than coherent sentences, make those separate questions, and mark them so.
- iliketosleep 7y ago> Otherwise, we are missing the whole point of essays which is to communicate effectively with another human, not just match certain text patterns. I agree, this is traditionally the purpose of an essay. But to play devil's advocate, consider the rising number of people who are writing SEO or ASO content which is actually targeted at machines.
- amirmasoudabdol 7y agoWhile this is already terrible, I’m aware of a few project that are trying to do the same with scientific literature. Basically they are trying to train models for scoring literatures based on their quality, novelty and what not. At the current rate and state of AI, I cannot ever imagine this is going to work. It was a few weeks ago that someone shared “The Dark Age of AI” on HN [1]. I think we are promising way over what Drew McDermott thought we would not going to promise. This is to the extend that we are applying AI on assessing Art, Creativity and even quality and novelty of Science, something that in a way we don’t even understand (or trying to understand) ourselves at the time that we are publishing it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20546503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20546503
- empath75 7y agoI imagine that any student that experimented with the form of the essay or wrote an exceptionally well argued piece in simple language would not have their test graded appropriately either. Any essay writing test which could be adequately graded by a machine is not testing anything of value. Edit: I’ll further add that as soon as people’s careers depend on a metric, the metric becomes useless as a metric, because it will be gamed and manipulated by everyone involved. Almost nobody involved is incentivized to accurately measure student’s writing ability.
- kazinator 7y agoI think machines could be valuable in giving feedback on writing, like that grammarly.com. A lot of what students write is actually garbage from that point of view. Even if they happen to have a good basic idea about what they want to say, the point of essay writing is to master the mechanics of expression so that you get the idea across effectively. Whether the student has a brilliant idea isn't even so important, and it wouldn't even be fair; imagine if high school computer science expected students to turn in a best-selling app for a term project. Not everyone can come up with something brilliant to say; and even relatively mundane lines of reasoning can be given a good treatment in writing to develop the skill. I remember when I had essays graded in school, a lot of the comments were low-grade fluff like "run on sentence", "wrong word", "faulty parallelism", "missing colon before 'for example'" and such points having nothing to do with the content being original, well-considered and well-argued. That sort of thing might as well be done by machine, at least as a preprocessing step to improve a student's rough draft.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoAlmost nobody involved is incentivized to accurately measure student’s writing ability It's the same reason you see keyword posters in math education. "Together" means "plus", that kind of thing. It's completely worthless, except for one-step problems, and even then it doesn't always work. What is happening is collusion between teachers and testmakers. You can't teach understanding, but you can teach test-passing techniques because the way the test is set permits this. You see the same thing here, in English you can get away with not teaching quality writing if you teach techniques to score well.
- drngdds 7y agoThis is my first time learning that AI-graded essays are a thing. Am I the only one who thinks that's insane? I feel like you'd probably have to have an AGI to meaningfully evaluate an essay.
- _delirium 7y agoI work in AI, and was very surprised when I heard about this (a few years ago). I don't think anyone who works in the area thinks the tech is ready for this kind of deployment. There is research on the subject [1], and NLP systems can do better than baseline methods, but the error rates are still pretty high. A thing you quickly find if you try to download off-the-shelf NLP tools and apply them to anything is how little is reliable at all, unless you can constrain the domain. Even basic topic identification only works with low error rates when constrained to something like NYT stories, or PubMed abstracts, not arbitrary text by arbitrary writers. And I would bet ETS is using worse tech than research state-of-the-art. [1] e.g. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P15-1053 https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P15-1053
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoHmmm. I also work in AI, in fact professionally in information retrieval and NLP. I disagree strongly with what you say. Basic topic summarization and keyword / named entity extraction on unstructured sources of text works reasonably well. It’s easy to modify BERT and GPT on smaller problems, language classification is borderline totally solved by extremely easy to train neural network models. I still agree that automatic essay grading is beyond the reach of SOTA NLP models today, but youmake it sound like virtually nothing can be done in a production-grade manner that solves real world unconstrained NLP problems. This is manifestly false.
- _delirium 7y agoIt's completely possible I'm not fully up on recent progress, especially since a bunch of stuff seems to have moved in the past 6 months. But I haven't seen any general models that can solve open-domain problems, without specifically retraining on each domain. Do you have any pointers? E.g. a single pretrained BERT model that can reliably extract topics from: tweets, paragraphs from 19th-century novels, mathematics journal articles, and Wikipedia articles? All the systems with very low error rates that I know of target one specific domain. The last time I looked into sentiment analysis (a year or so ago), it wasn't even that great on many individual domains, e.g. it would get tripped up by sentences from novels that used "negative" keywords in a humorous or ironic way.
- crispcarb 7y agoBecause a (likely unsophisticated) algorithm is grading the essays, there's probably a deterministic method to do score well. This seems like a terrible idea. It's not a stretch to imagine the opportunity for nefarious behavior this allows - think of the recent college admission scandals, and how happy they'd be to have a guise of algorithmic indifference'. If used long-term, it could offer a big advantage to the wealthy in other avenues. Another hypothetical, probably not far from reality: the algorithm becomes solved (almost or completely) by some premier 'tutoring' company. Said company can charge a pretty penny given its stellar track record, offering yet another hidden advantage to the wealthy/elite.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aidenn0 7y agoSurely there's a deterministic method to score well on the math questions?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jakear 7y ago“In most machine scoring states, any of the randomly selected essays with wide discrepancies between human and machine scores are referred to another human for review”. And “between 5 to 20 percent” of essays are randomly selected for human review. So the takeaway is that if you’re one of the 80-95% of (typically black or female) people who the machine scored dramatically lower, but are not selected for human review, your education future is systematically fucked and you have no knowledge of why or how to change it. Absolutely reprehensible. Anyone involved in the creation or adoption of these systems should be ashamed.
- kazinator 7y agoThe thing is, you could be similarly screwed by a biased human whose grading is not checked by a less biased human. At least the machines offer the following hope: even if unbiased humans are rare among paper-grading teachers, those humans can be used to train the machines, so then bias-free or lower-bias grading becomes more ubiquitous. Basically, the system has the potential for systematically identifying and reducing systematic bias. A computer program can be retrained much more readily than nation-wide army of humans. Humans can be given a lecture on bias, and then they will just return to their ways.
- gibolt 7y agoAI has a lot more potential for bias than humans. It depends on the input data which is likely heavily biased based on other data set results like face detection. It will only amplify any small bias present in the data.
- solveit 7y agoSo will humans. With AI, the model and training data are auditable and, if necessary, modifiable. You can't audit a person's life history and you can only really modify a grader by replacing them, and it's much less socially damaging to retrain a model than to fire an employee. AI certainly has a lot of potential for bias, but claims that AI bias is somehow worse than good old human bias always seem shoddily supported (Note I'm not claiming it's untrue. Just that it's never been shown to my satisfaction, which is not surprising given how quickly AI is changing. It may well be true.)
- VikingCoder 7y agoMy mother worked grading standardized tests. It was a hellish job for many reasons (limited breaks, etc.) One question she had to grade was essentially, "What's something you want your teacher to know about you?" It was an essay answer, and she was supposed to grade it on grammar, etc. Just the mechanical aspects of writing. (The real question explained the details more, but that was the core of the question.) She saw answers that would make you weep. "My daddy touches me." "I haven't eaten today. I don't know when I'm going to eat again." Stuff like that. And my mother was going to be the only human who ever saw their responses. Their teacher had no chance to see their responses, just my mom. So she goes to her supervisor and asks, "What can we do to help these kids?" The supervisor said there was nothing you can do. Just grade the answers.
- rhexs 7y agoOr...report it to the police? I’d gladly risk my job to do the right thing in that instance.
- sjg007 7y agoThey should be mandatory reporters at least in the USA.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoSchool contractors are mandatory reporters, but I suspect that may not qualify.
- garmaine 7y agoThese would not be school contractors.
- ineedasername 7y agoWhy not? The school contracts with the testing agency that does the grading. Seems like a contractor relationship?
- rdtwo 7y agoBringing SEO mentality to standardized testing what could go wrong.
- nostrademons 7y agoIt seems like these accumulated errors in the educational system and filters needed to get through it would create a market inefficiency that could be exploited by a firm willing to ignore degrees, grades, and test scores and judge for themselves whether a candidate can do the job they're being hired for.
- anm89 7y agoTo me this brings up the absurdity of having essays on standardized tests. What about an essay is standardized? It's a totally nonsensical premise. This always gets made into some kind of techluminati conspiracy for the machines to ingrain structural racism whereas it's pretty clear all the algorithms fail to do is improve an already bad situation stemming from a flawed premise.
- nitwit005 7y agoA number of states found out their schools were graduating students who genuinely could not read or write effectively. If you want to quantify that, you're forced to test it somehow. How would you test writing ability without asking them to write something?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoIt's nuts when you put it that way. To really standardize an essay, you'd have to give the prompt and argument to be made and just test their ability to turn it into prose.
- Meekro 7y agoFrom the article: "All essays scored by E-rater are also graded by a human and discrepancies are sent to a second human for a final grade. Because of that system, ETS does not believe any students have been adversely affected by the bias detected in E-rater."
- snazz 7y agoThat particular company seems to do a not-horrible job. But they’re not the only game in town, so presumably most or many essays are graded by another company’s system.
- shkkmo 7y agoAlso from the article: > Of those 21 states, three said every essay is also graded by a human. But in the remaining 18 states, only a small percentage of students’ essays—it varies between 5 to 20 percent—will be randomly selected for a human grader to double check the machine’s work. So that applies only in a minority of cases.
- Meekro 7y agoOops, my mistake! That's worse than I thought!
- jedberg 7y agoAny state that relies on the AI as the primary grader does not understand the current state of AI. It would make sense to use the AI as a first pass, and then not randomly grade the essays with a human, but specifically choose all the essays that are on the cusp of the pass fail line. Then use all those human generated scores to update the model, especially if someone moves from pass to fail or fail to pass. Then maybe throw in a few of the really high and really low outliers to make sure those are right, and throw away your entire model if the human scores are drastically different (and obviously don't tell the humans what the computer score was so they have no idea if they're reading a "cusp" essay or an outlier essay). But putting the educational fate (and therefore future earnings) in the hands of an AI is unconscionable.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoBut I bet the company took the decision makers to a really nice restaurant nudge nudge
- waynecochran 7y agoI would like to see how it scored on essays by great writers. “Sorry Mr Tolkien, I’m afraid you have to go to community college first.”
- analog31 7y agoIn my state, it's going to be "Sorry Mr Tolkien, but we eliminated all of the departments that are not STEM enough."
- rkagerer 7y agoI'm normally pretty open minded but this is just stupid. AI is nowhere near literate enough for this task. What kind of world is it when humans create merely for the consumption of machines. The product of our creativity deserves better. I would support any student who refuses to consent to their work being used in this fashion.
- danharaj 7y agoThis is a natural development of industrialized education. Treating children as individual thinkers would require for more resources and manpower than our system would like to provide.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 7y agoI've heard stories from others in the industry of companies using tools like this on their human-facing documentation and requiring a certain score from them. Imagine using Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar checker, not being able to add or override its decisions (without following an extremely lengthy and bureaucratic process), and being required to have less than X "defects" per 100 words. Naturally, this results in documentation that is perfectly grammatical and free of spelling errors, but verbose, full of unusual phrasing, and next to useless for its actual purpose of informing a human. Grading students' code using a machine is not such a bad idea in contrast, because in that case there is [1] no exceptions possible in a programming language, [2] the machine (compiler) has to understand it anyway, and [3] it does save time verifying correctness. But communication in a human language really needs to be assessed by humans. Anyone who thinks "AI" can accurately assess human language is either severely delusional, or trying to make $$$ from it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 40acres 7y agoThe sooner we get it out of our heads that this education system of ours is a meritocracy the closer we’ll get to actually creating a quality universal system.
- lopmotr 7y agoI wish this machine bias wasn't always presented in such divisive terms as race and "disadvantaged groups". It can affect anybody. If you happened to develop a writing style that looks like typical bad essay writers' style, then you could be hurt by bias in the grading.
- crooked-v 7y agoAnyone can be hurt by bias, but minority groups are the obvious ones to be most likely statistically affected by it, making them the most obvious red flag for this kind of situation.
- fzeroracer 7y agoIf an image processing algorithm fails to recognize black people or worse, profiles them, how else should this be described but in terms of race? If you don't talk about the actual problem, how can you possibly expect to solve it?
- lopmotr 7y agoThere are many classes of people who have problems of discrimination. Short, ugly, ginger, etc. The intersections of all those classes are so numerous that everybody will have some disadvantage. But it won't be apparent unless you define their class and measure it.
- crooked-v 7y agoThat's just substituting in smaller or harder-to-define minority groups, though.
- Nasrudith 7y agoIn terms of the technical effect that causes it as opposed to sociological. The point then isn't that the algorithm hates black people or the programmers are racist (even if they were they would likely find it hard to train it to specifically exclude accurately without major side effects), but that their training set or analysis is flawed - potentially even if it is representative. Even if the results are problematic trying to address hate which isn't there won't be helpful. Call for better vetting procedures instead or that it clearly isn't ready for the proposed application. Say it gets the highest accuracy on a set of photos of non-people images and a set of people which represents the exact ethnic make up all tagged just as "has people" or "doesn't have people". Going with something biased towards the most populous groups would get the best results quickest. Talking about say image tagging to ensure automated performance checking across various characteristics could be productive on the other hand.
- nyxtom 7y agoGood lord what a terrible design. Rather than determine if the writer has a coherent understanding and a complex prompt, the system grades based on writing patterns. This is actually my biggest fear of AI. Deploying wide scale systems like this that have very clear flaws
- aaron695 7y agoHalf of Vice is garbage and it's growing. They seem to have figured out being political gets them clicks over substance. So much for the days they just reported stories other media wouldn't cover. Any sources backing anything here? Is NLP actually used to primarily grade papers anywhere in the USA? It seems way beyond current technology. Checking if a human marker doesn't need their score checked, perhaps could possibly be implemented.
- wedn3sday 7y agoYou say "flawed algorithm," I saw "easily exploitable by intelligent students."
- bendbro 7y agoI think machine learned grading of papers is insane, but at the same time I don't think we should be training or encouraging students to speak in AAVE (as the article suggests). I think the right approach for machine learned systems is to automatically "whitelist" essays rather than "blacklisting" them. Students in the middle of the distribution of essays aren't really interesting, so whitelist them, give them a pass. Those at the extremes can be either exceptional or terrible, but usually terrible. The judgement of those at the extremes should be decided by a human, not a machine. You wouldn't want to blacklist the Einstein of essays because he did something genius that is indistinguishable from insanity. However, I think there are some essays that can automatically be blacklisted. For example, those with: 1. Plagiarism (perhaps human moderated) 2. Extremely low word count 3. Extremely high count of fake words And at the end of the day, these essay assignments aren't there to judge whether a student is the next writing sensation; they are given to judge whether the student can write legible sentences and words, to ensure they are prepared for the future. So perhaps it is at least possible to automatically blacklist on sentence structure and spelling (you should just lose points for invalid structure or invalid words, you shouldn't gain points for big words or complicated sentences). To make this fair, the student should be informed of this requirement. If they are informed and still fail, then they need to be remediated. If we discover that a disproportionate number of minorities are getting blacklisted, then we should investigate why the school is failing to teach them proper sentence structure and spelling, not pretend we can change the world to make AAVE an acceptable dialect of english in the workplace.
- colechristensen 7y agoQuality of educational is proportional to quality of evaluation. Evaluation of how well someone follows arbitrary language conventions is worse than useless. I only got to university English 101 outside of some technical writing in the engineering department, but I have to say none of my education in writing was worth anything past elementary school. It is perhaps one of the most difficult things to teach and evaluate, to be fair, but I feel like I am missing a huge chunk of my education and general ability because of it. I can't write or form an argument particularly well, rambling on HN and the like is the closest thing to education I have had. Prescriptive language rules are not entirely useless. That is the best you can say about them.
- dahart 7y ago> Utah has been using AI as the primary scorer on its standardized tests for several years. “It was a major cost to our state to hand score, in addition to very time consuming,” said Cydnee Carter, the state’s assessment development coordinator. The automated process also allowed the state to give immediate feedback to students and teachers, she said. Yes, education takes time and costs money. Yes, not educating is both cheaper and faster. Note how the rationalizing ignores the needs of the students and the quality of the education. I live in Utah and my children have been subjected to this automated essay scoring here. One night I came home from work and my son and wife were both in tears, frustrated with each other and frustrated with the essay scoring which refused to give a high enough score to meet what the teacher said was required, no matter how good the essay was. My wife wrote versions herself from scratch and couldn’t get the required score. When I got involved, I did the same with the same results. Turns out the instructions said the essay would be scored on verbal efficiency; getting the point across clearly with the fewest words. I started playing around and realized that the more words I added, the higher the score, whether they were relevant or grammatical or not. Random unrelated sentences pasted in the middle would increase the score. We found a letter of petition online for banning automated scoring for the purposes of grades or student evaluation of any kind. It was very long, so it got a perfect score. I encouraged my son to submit it, and he did. Later I visited his teacher to explain and to urge her to not use automated scoring. She listened and then told me about how much time it saves and how fast students get feedback. :/
- daveFNbuck 7y agoDo you just get to keep submitting the essay to see what score it will get before you turn it in? That sounds like a bigger problem than any of the particulars about how the grading is done.
- dahart 7y agoIn this case, there was a limit to the number of times the essay could be submitted, and there was a required score that needed to be obtained within that limit, otherwise the grade would go down. The limit was something like 20 tries, and when I got there they’d already used maybe 14 of them. I could perhaps see value in having unlimited tries, as a teaching aid, if the result wasn’t being used for grading. That would at least leave room for curiosity and exploration. And, more importantly, I could see value if the software wasn’t essentially a scam that fundamentally is not able do what is advertised. If the software really could grade essays reliably, and provide meaningful suggestions for improvement, then maybe it could be used to help educate students, in conjunction with the teacher’s guidance. But the software does not grade reliably, and it absolutely does not offer meaningful constructive feedback, and the teachers were using it to avoid reading essays, not to supplement their own expertise. One of the several amusing ironies here is how the software company has convinced the state and teachers to willingly replace themselves with bots, despite obvious evidence that the humans can do the job better.
- readme 7y agoAbsolute garbage. Kids would be better educated by reading and posting on HN than they would by attending English classes in one of the states that uses these tools.
- nyxtom 7y agoIt is becoming increasingly evident that the hubris for implementing AI is what is going to ruin everything.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoWhat are teachers but flawed Algorithms?
- inlined 7y ago> the engines also focus heavily on metrics like sentence length, vocabulary, spelling, and subject-verb agreement... The systems are also unable to judge more nuanced aspects of writing, like creativity. This reminds me of a wonderful essay/speech by Stephen Fry on the harm done by pedantry. I also feel that schools focus so much on a single structure of essay writing and similarly take the joy out of language. https://youtu.be/J7E-aoXLZGY https://youtu.be/J7E-aoXLZGY
- kwhitefoot 7y agoWhy are algorithms grading essays in the first place?
- dlkf 7y agoThis is a great example of why it's grossly irresponsible for members of the ML community to talk about how AGI is just around the corner. In addition to the fact that we have no idea whether this is true, it primes a naive public for believing that technologies like this are worth the tradeoff. "People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they're too stupid and they've already taken over the world."
- amatecha 7y agoGrading... algorithms... for essays? How/why is that even a thing? That's absolutely insane. You can't grade someone's writing skills using algorithms. That is totally counter to providing a proper education. My mind is officially boggled.
- rynomad 7y agoPersonal anecdote; I remember taking a standardized test, can't remember if it was SAT or CSAT (Colorado pre-SAT test). This was at a time when I'm confident that humans were the graders. I started with an intro that would be appropriate for a standard 5 paragraph essay; i.e. the thing you write when you don't know what you're talking about and you're just following a format. In the third paragraph I took a leaf from family guy, and just interjected "WAFFLES, NICE CRISPY WAFFLES, WITH LOTS OF SYRUP." for the next page and a half, I berated the very foundation of the essay prompt, insulting it the way only an angst ridden early teen can. ... I got a 98% on the essay. Fast forward several years. I write an essay for for an introductory college course final. My paper is returned to me with a coffee stain and a "94% - good work!" note scribbled on the top. That note was scribbled by a TA that would turn out to be my girlfriend for 2 years. One night in bed, she tilts her laptop to me, showing an article that I used as the central theme to the above essay; "can you believe this?" "Are you joking? Of course I can believe this, it was the subject of the essay you gave me an A on 2 years ago" She admits she didn't read past the first paragraph of anything she grades, and just bases grades on intuition based on how articulate the essays are at the outset. ... The point I'm making: Does AI suck at judging the amount of informative content in a student essay? YES Do humans suck at judging the amount of informative content in a student essay? ALSO YES
- auggierose 7y agoI can't believe that anyone would try to automatically grade essays. This is either deeply cynical or astonishingly dumb.
- mrarjen 7y agoReminds me of the plagiarism checker they had at my partners university, they would check identical words on specific subjects... Meaning every word in any order, so naturally there is a high % of overlap not only with quotes but also the words used regarding the subject, the teacher would take this literally as "you did not write this yourself" if 10% of words would be similar. Don't think anyone passed that class.
- robinwassen 7y agoI am working with reducing the time teachers spend on exams and assessments. I have access to a cleaned and manually scored dataset of 550k essays that is exponentially growing. Looked at creating at a model based on this dataset to automatically score essays with NLP parameters such as grammar, structure, spelling, word complexity, sentiment, relative text length etc. The problem that I encountered was actually how to apply it in a useful way, since the problems mentioned in the article are quite obvious when you design the model. Options that I saw: 1. Use it as autonomous grading with optional review by the teacher, see the linked article for the problems with this. 2. Use it as a sanity check on the teachers manual scoring, but it would not reduce the work load and probably just undermine the teacher. Do you have any suggestions for how such a model could be applied in a practical and ethical way? Had some thoughts on how to measure actual knowledge about a subject, but that would require a massive knowledge graph which would introduce a huge amount of complexity just to see if it would be a feasible approach.
- na_ka_na 7y agoHere are some thoughts: 1. Instead of grading, maybe you can use it for training, tutoring. If a student is learning to write essays, I'm assuming it's hard for them to get any feedback. 2. But then there's probably not enough money to be earned there. One trick might be to write an independent AI to summarize the essay back and see how closely it matches the essay title. This might weed out gibberish essays with sound English sentences.
- eukaryote31 7y agoCurrent Transformer models are looking pretty good at complex end-to-end tasks (at least, better than the shallow regression with hand-picked features that ETS probably uses). In a few years, complete end-to-end evaluation may not be so impossible, especially with so much data.
- choeger 7y agoSuch a stupid application of technology. It looks as if learning is completely out of fashion nowadays. First of all, complaining about minorities getting lower grades because their English is not as sophisticated as that of others is the inversion of the idea of teaching. That feedback is actually great. We have machines that can give that feedback (e.g., grammarly)? Then use it to make everyone's writing better. Grades are just a measure of the success of learning, after all. I never got why one would not allow a student to repeat a particular test as often as they like, tbh. Second, grading essays this way is a clear violation of the idea of teaching. What do you want the students to learn? Structure? Knowledge transfer? Grammar? Writing an essay is such a complex task it is a really too broad goal. And then naturally grading becomes quite difficult.
- pauljurczak 7y agoTeachers talk back and even may unionize! Crappy AI is cheap and can't unionize.
- Smithalicious 7y agoI don't even think I would be qualified to grade essays, let alone an algorithm!
- lmilcin 7y agoI live in Poland and it is the first time I hear about it. I am absolutely apalled. Not even at the idea of grading by algorithm, but by the fact that many, many people had to cooperate to make this happen.
- gerbilly 7y agoWhy are we even bothering to discuss this on this site? Wouldn't it be better and less biased if we each wrote our own AI systems and had them discuss with each other instead? (And we should publish our training data as well, of course)
- ironSkillet 7y agoThe underlying problem is that reading essays with a careful critical eye is not scalable. But another issue this highlights is the complete misalignment of incentives of the people who greenlit the adoption of this technology. Because educational outcomes are much harder to evaluate over the course of a bureaucrat's tenure than budget sizes (longer time horizon and many exogenous variables), there is a natural inclination to make decisions that reduce costs as long as they don't have any obvious (to them or their superiors) adverse outcome for students. This is a pretty low bar, especially so given that most bureaucrats do not have the background necessary to evaluate technical solutions.
- MisterBastahrd 7y agoHere's a thought: if classwork and homework is getting so overwhelming that teachers can't possibly grade all of it, then it's overwhelming for the STUDENTS too, and they shouldn't freaking be assigning so much busywork. You don't need a 5 page essay to determine whether a kid has read a book. You can figure that out really quickly in a classroom discussion without anyone having to lift a pencil.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Here's a thought: if classwork and homework is getting so overwhelming that teachers can't possibly grade all of it, then it's overwhelming for the STUDENTS too There's no necessary connection there, especially if one of the reasons that teachers are being overwhelmed is that the teacher/student ratio is increasing. > You don't need a 5 page essay to determine whether a kid has read a book. No, you need it to determine whether a student has (1) read and understood a book well enough to apply structured thought to the contents and (2) has developed the writing skills to write a 5-page essay. Determining whether a student read a book is rarely, on its own, of significant interest in school.