I 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 a

I 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.