Monday, September 08, 2008

Computers cannot score essays (yet!)

Computers cannot and should not be used to score/grade an essay. At least for the current state of art, this is a fact. 10 years from now this post of mine might be ridiculous.

With the current state of art, if you depend on a computer algorithm to grade people's writing skills, you are making a big mistake.

Here's [yarnsoftheheart.com] one person's account of her experiences with an 'online essay scoring system'.

Read the 'essay' that was scored and the score that the system assigned to it. If you were the teacher grading that essay, would you give it the same score ? If you have a child going to a school that uses something like this to grade essays, you may want to have a talk with the teacher.

[via Kem's Utterly Merciless Guide to Essay Writing]

1 comment:

Jena said...

Hi! Thanks for linking to me. I'm glad to read your opinion about this whole thing. Pretty crazy.