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 thi

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.