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Do 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

Do 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 ago
In 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.
- daveFNbuck 7y ago
  I can see how giving students multiple tries would be a great teaching aid if we had human-level AI. With what we have now, I'd bet it's just training them to produce essays that hit the flaws in the AI as hard as possible to produce unreadable garbage with high scores. 20 tries per essay adds up to a lot across 12 years of schooling. Teachers are extremely overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. I'm not surprised that it was easy to convince them to offload the difficult and time-consuming work of manually grading essays. This also means they don't have to deal with complaints about unfair grading. A machine did it and it's out of their hands.

Do 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 ago

In 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.

daveFNbuck 7y ago
I can see how giving students multiple tries would be a great teaching aid if we had human-level AI. With what we have now, I'd bet it's just training them to produce essays that hit the flaws in the AI as hard as possible to produce unreadable garbage with high scores. 20 tries per essay adds up to a lot across 12 years of schooling. Teachers are extremely overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. I'm not surprised that it was easy to convince them to offload the difficult and time-consuming work of manually grading essays. This also means they don't have to deal with complaints about unfair grading. A machine did it and it's out of their hands.