<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>