> Marder and Henderson worry robo-graders will just encourage the worst kind of formulaic writing.
> they will quickly learn they can fool the algorithm by using lots of big words, complex sentences, and some key phrases - that make some English teachers cringe.
Spot on! That's already the case with real teachers, with a computer it'll be hundreds of times easier (and horribly counter productive for the students' formation).
Back in the day, when I was a student, we already did a LOT of padding in our essays: writing pages upon pages (length mattered enormously!) of loooong sentences designed to -basically- make the discours look much more clever (and accurate) than it really was. I'm still puzzled why our teachers did not notice the obvious B.S. that it was! Seriously, I managed to pass some classes (university) with almost no real meat in the text. I just managed to write a coherent & logical argument, with a minimum of (vaguely remembered) facts, and that was enough to get a passing grade (but not a great grade of course). Ridiculous.
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Another fundamental problem is that even teachers don't have the same views upon what is a good essay. For the worst essays, I think they will agree: bad grammar, typos, no paragraphs, no logical structure, etc. But once you enter the average (or more) quality it becomes much more difficult to agree on which text is better! There is a LOT of subjectivity and personal taste, no matter what directives were given from the educational board, so your results would vary a lot depending on your current teacher.
Some teachers for instance are very narrow-minded, they expect students to "regurgitate" their lessons almost word by word, others appreciate a student's attempt to insight & originality / independence of thought. I've been in the french education system for a long time (including 6 years in 3 different universities), and it was shocking to see how much of a grade would depend on the teacher & of their perception of you (because that's also a factor, even if the teachers will swear it's not the case).
Even for technical subjects it's not obvious AT ALL that the teacher is right and rewarding the best answers. Now that I have many years of programming/projects management behind me, I see plainly the mistakes & B.S. that some teachers would give us. And I've had coworkers who were still part-time students explain some of the incredible misconceptions of their teachers, it was almost beyond belief! Those teachers really lived in another world, they had no clue.
Well, at least, if you are graded by a program, you know that you will only have to learn that program's "tastes/patterns", instead of facing the unknown of being graded by a random teacher (who may like your style or not). That's a small consolation.
> they will quickly learn they can fool the algorithm by using lots of big words, complex sentences, and some key phrases - that make some English teachers cringe.
Spot on! That's already the case with real teachers, with a computer it'll be hundreds of times easier (and horribly counter productive for the students' formation).
Back in the day, when I was a student, we already did a LOT of padding in our essays: writing pages upon pages (length mattered enormously!) of loooong sentences designed to -basically- make the discours look much more clever (and accurate) than it really was. I'm still puzzled why our teachers did not notice the obvious B.S. that it was! Seriously, I managed to pass some classes (university) with almost no real meat in the text. I just managed to write a coherent & logical argument, with a minimum of (vaguely remembered) facts, and that was enough to get a passing grade (but not a great grade of course). Ridiculous.
---
Another fundamental problem is that even teachers don't have the same views upon what is a good essay. For the worst essays, I think they will agree: bad grammar, typos, no paragraphs, no logical structure, etc. But once you enter the average (or more) quality it becomes much more difficult to agree on which text is better! There is a LOT of subjectivity and personal taste, no matter what directives were given from the educational board, so your results would vary a lot depending on your current teacher.
Some teachers for instance are very narrow-minded, they expect students to "regurgitate" their lessons almost word by word, others appreciate a student's attempt to insight & originality / independence of thought. I've been in the french education system for a long time (including 6 years in 3 different universities), and it was shocking to see how much of a grade would depend on the teacher & of their perception of you (because that's also a factor, even if the teachers will swear it's not the case).
Even for technical subjects it's not obvious AT ALL that the teacher is right and rewarding the best answers. Now that I have many years of programming/projects management behind me, I see plainly the mistakes & B.S. that some teachers would give us. And I've had coworkers who were still part-time students explain some of the incredible misconceptions of their teachers, it was almost beyond belief! Those teachers really lived in another world, they had no clue.
Well, at least, if you are graded by a program, you know that you will only have to learn that program's "tastes/patterns", instead of facing the unknown of being graded by a random teacher (who may like your style or not). That's a small consolation.