<p>I know that my views on writing and how it should be taught are old fashioned but I find this appalling.</p>
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Computer</a> grading of student essays is tested at Colleyville Heritage High | Schools | Ne...
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<p>Your thoughts?</p>
<p>MissyPie – I would’t look at it as an English problem, but as a math problem. If an English teacher spends 5 minutes per student grading work each week, and has 5 classes of 35 students, that’s more than 15 hours of just grading above and beyond teaching, planning, … – and many teachers teach six periods, bringing it to 18 hours a week. I wouldn’t look at computer grading as being either perfect or sufficient, but as a supplement used some of the time, not necessarily bad. In a lot of student writing, simple errors – subject-verb agreement, punctuation errors, and even some word choice errors can be detected by the better systems. These systems are a substantial improvement over the terrible grammar checker in Word – even some universities use them in writing labs for at least the first pass or two.</p>
<p>I’ve argued to little avail that English teachers should have a lighter class load than other teachers rather precisely because of the grading burden. I’d rather see an English teacher be able to take the time to critique a student’s reasoning than use that same time to mark all the areas where there are simpler grammatical problems.</p>
<p>I wish we’d had a copy of the computer program when my son was perfecting the “formula” for the writing portion of the ACT. He could have gone in with a couple of canned essays (modified as necessary to fit the prompt) that had been “road tested” in advance. lol</p>
<p>To answer your question, Missypie, having a computer grade English papers would be like having a robot judge the apple pies at the county fair. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I do understand and sympathize with the impossible time demands faced by English teachers. My son had a superlative writing teacher his senior year, whose detailed critiques turned him into a very good writer. I was so grateful for her.</p>
<p>It’s also probably being considered because it can potentially catch more people that plagiarize.</p>
<p>Sent from my PC36100 using CC App</p>
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<p>I hear ya. It seems like every school ought to have a couple of excellent writing teachers and at some point, every student would have a class with one of them.</p>
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<p>Smaller classes…in public schools…in Texas…we can only dream!</p>
<p>English teachers could have a lower class load (4 instead of 5) with no budget impact by simply allowing social studies, gym, music, and art classes to be larger. Freeing up 50 minutes a day substantially expands the English teacher’s time available for grading, and these other subjects don’t have nearly the out-of-class workload for a teacher as does English; AP History classes would be the exception. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, teacher contracts are almost uniformly written as if a teacher in PE has just as much out-of-class prep and grading time as one in English, which I haven’t found to be true. (If anything, PE teachers are often paid additional sums as their out-of-class time is often couched in terms of a coaching assignment.)</p>
<p>It’s a useful tool… for determining which students have mastered the attention-grabbing-introduction-topic-sentence-subtopic1-subtopic2-big-words-everywhere formula. Turning essay grading over to essay-grading software is basically an admission on behalf of the school that its teachers don’t expect their students to think outside the box, use complex or unusual writing techniques, or develop unique writing styles–all things that would deviate from the described model. I have nothing against College Board’s use of this grading method (if your essay is too short, it gets graded by a computer) because the SAT is supposed to assess your basic literacy, not your creativity. But it is appalling that high schools are lowering their standards so much.</p>
<p>Ugh. Why bother with the teacher? Just teach from a computer and save lots of $$$. </p>
<p>I think it is very difficult to teach students to write well, and I think the only way that this can be done is by giving feedback one on one, and extensive written comments where needed. I taught writing umpteen plus years ago, and it took time to grade the papers. </p>
<p>If you don’t want to grade papers, don’t be an english or writing teacher. However, that said, I do think that treating PE, Art, or other electives with little to no prep time equally is not proper.</p>
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<p>At Meet the Teacher night last fall, I went straight from younger D’s geometry class to older D’s AP English IV class. The math teacher told us not to expect feedback on homework because she teaches 6 classes and doesn’t have time. The AP English teacher - who had more students enrolled and teaches just as many classes - made no such comment. (This is given of an example of an English teacher who knew what she was getting into.)</p>
<p>I don’t see this as a problem. It appears to be a tool that students can use before submitting the essay to the teacher for grading. It’s like using a spell-checker or grammar-checker while you are creating your essay. The difference is that there’s an additional level of automated analysis provided to the student. The student can choose whether or not to use the advice of the tool before submitting the essay.</p>
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<p>True…so far. With budgets slashed, how long before the computer has the final say?</p>
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<p>That’s what I don’t get about any form of computer grading. Does the computer know if it is right? If the student writes “Boo Radley has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers”, would the computer only grade the vocab, sentence structure, etc. and not catch that the student has mixed up the characters?</p>
<p>Don’t you all know extremely bright students who would make a game of it? Write a paper in total ignorance of the book and see if you can get a 5, based on sentence structure, etc If the teacher didn’t read the essays, it could work.</p>
<p>Of course, students have been doing that to human graders forever. H tells about one teacher he had. The guy actually graded the first essay. Then every other grade was the grade the student got on the first one. They would actually insert stuff in the middle of the essay like, “Mr. __, I know you won’t read this and that I will get a 92 on this paper” and they were right.</p>
<p>So, maybe the computer is an improvement over some writing teachers.</p>
<p>The program could have a grammar-checker component - similar to the
one that comes with Microsoft Word. The Microsoft Word checker (I
believe; I haven’t used it in a few years) tells you the problem and
may suggest alternatives.</p>
<p>Reading through a modern textbook on Artificial Intelligence would
probably leave you pretty unimpressed with what computers can do. The
problem is that you need to take a number of math and programming
courses before you can understand the AI book.</p>
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<p>I discussed this with my son after he took the Accuplacer test. This
was several years before he studied computer language theory and
artificial intelligence. Stuff that seemed like magic no longer was.</p>
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<p>The computer is just a tool.</p>
<p>I guess my big problem - and of course it’s a problem at any stage or any standardized test where writing is graded by a computer - is the fear that it will make everyone (at least everyone who wants to do well on the tests) write in the same way.</p>
<p>I’ve graded standardized tests. Please believe me – for the vast, vast majority of students, simply getting frequent feedback on basic structural problems, spelling errors, and grammatical errors would be a tremendous benefit, especially if the program was smart enough to display the problems and the associated explanation in a way that makes sense to students, not just as a series of changes or simply as a grade. </p>
<p>This doesn’t get away from the teacher needing to help the students develop arguments and voice, but personally I’d rather work with students on the quality of their arguments and supporting data before the arguments have been written into an essay. In my experience, most students’ willingness to radically change their arguments and find better supporting evidence is directly proportional to the amount of time they’ve already invested in the essay. Once they’ve done a full first draft it can be very hard to budge them. </p>
<p>And on the accuracy front? Did you know that many states adopt grading rubrics for statewide writing tests that prohibit graders from incorporating the accuracy of any assertions into the score? Or that the rules may prohibit dinging a student more than once for a certain kind of grammar/spelling error – so a kid who writes an essay with 1 subject-verb disagreement and 1 spelling error gets dinged just like the student with eight subject-verb disagreements and 25 spelling errors. Yes, they’re scored by humans, but the rules may not be what you think they are.</p>
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<p>No, I didn’t know that. Good grief.</p>