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Exactly -- teaching and grading should be separated. I'd prefer a smart AI over some random remote assessor any day. I always disliked the usual subjective wa

Exactly -- teaching and grading should be separated. I'd prefer a smart AI over some random remote assessor any day. I always disliked the usual subjective way of grading, in particular if it takes several weeks to receive them. Having a smart program grade me instantly, and fairly, I think I would have liked it!

troutwine 15y ago
My wife is doing graduate work in Old English; most of her assignments to her students have a strongly quantitative nature: did you or did you not translate this correctly? Her peers, however, are in more murky territory. They study things like Gender and Being and Ideas of Progress in Post-Shakespeare England: strongly quantitative work. Hearing them talk at parties, the most common conversation is one of how they approach grading, being what rough heuristics they use. That some clever, overworked person is grading a essay means no more than having a heuristic markov process applied to establish some value for a given text but poorly owing to exhaustion and disinterest and arbitrary bias. If we absolutely must peg a number to a person's work then we might as well have a computer do it reproducibly. I can't imagine there will be many University humanities departments happy to adopt such "inhuman" methods: best to wear actual humans down to nothing.
- troutwine 15y ago
  Please forgive the spelling issues and the last "quantitative" where I meant rather "qualitative". I've been struck by a miserable cold.
ydant 15y ago
If the assumption is that homework and tests are designed to help the student learn the material, then subjective grading is very beneficial. For example, there are ways of solving math or comp sci problems (including simple "typos"), especially when you don't understand the rules properly, that will give a correct result, for the wrong reasons. I would much rather a math or computer science teacher be looking through the process used to find the answer - and providing constructive feedback. Just getting a quick yes/no response back seems a lot less helpful to me. I don't know how much the human graders mentioned in the article actually do in terms of feedback, but I imagine we're still a ways away from a program having insight into WHY you chose the wrong method or made the mistake you did. The program can't help tailor their teaching to help set you straight. Of course, my view on this is likely clouded by the fact I went to a small school with small class sizes throughout. When you only have 5-20 people in each class, direct professor engagement happens. If I had to deal with TAs, I don't know how I would feel about the matter.

troutwine 15y ago

My wife is doing graduate work in Old English; most of her assignments to her students have a strongly quantitative nature: did you or did you not translate this correctly? Her peers, however, are in more murky territory. They study things like Gender and Being and Ideas of Progress in Post-Shakespeare England: strongly quantitative work. Hearing them talk at parties, the most common conversation is one of how they approach grading, being what rough heuristics they use. That some clever, overworked person is grading a essay means no more than having a heuristic markov process applied to establish some value for a given text but poorly owing to exhaustion and disinterest and arbitrary bias. If we absolutely must peg a number to a person's work then we might as well have a computer do it reproducibly. I can't imagine there will be many University humanities departments happy to adopt such "inhuman" methods: best to wear actual humans down to nothing.

troutwine 15y ago
Please forgive the spelling issues and the last "quantitative" where I meant rather "qualitative". I've been struck by a miserable cold.

ydant 15y ago

If the assumption is that homework and tests are designed to help the student learn the material, then subjective grading is very beneficial. For example, there are ways of solving math or comp sci problems (including simple "typos"), especially when you don't understand the rules properly, that will give a correct result, for the wrong reasons. I would much rather a math or computer science teacher be looking through the process used to find the answer - and providing constructive feedback. Just getting a quick yes/no response back seems a lot less helpful to me. I don't know how much the human graders mentioned in the article actually do in terms of feedback, but I imagine we're still a ways away from a program having insight into WHY you chose the wrong method or made the mistake you did. The program can't help tailor their teaching to help set you straight. Of course, my view on this is likely clouded by the fact I went to a small school with small class sizes throughout. When you only have 5-20 people in each class, direct professor engagement happens. If I had to deal with TAs, I don't know how I would feel about the matter.