<p>Has anybody else heard about the rumors that SAT essays will be graded electronically by computers in the near future?</p>
<p>I know the CollegeBoard has a program already running in one of its prep courses.</p>
<p>For heaven's sake, this is a ridiculous suggestion. Humanless grading will never be possible or efficient.</p>
<p>But if it's so ridiculous, then why are they currently doing it for their online course?</p>
<p>Yea I heard collegeboard will use a machine to grade the essays as soon they work it out. That just shows collegeboard is lazy</p>
<p>the new electronic MCATs have one of their essays machine graded</p>
<p>so who knows? its a likely possiblity in the future for SATs</p>
<p>I don't get how a machine could grade an essay.</p>
<p>ummm... okay. I'm all for machine grading (would be nice to get scores earlier, etc.) So I'm not trying to be overly-skeptical or something. But I do have one question...</p>
<p>HOW ON EARTH can a COMPUTER score an ESSAY?!</p>
<p>Well. In theory you could write two shorter essays, have one computer graded, one human graded. If the scores are within 1, they stand, if not the essay is graded by a human. Just my thoughts.</p>
<p>or you could be a computer genius and figure exactly how it works, and instead of writing an essay you can write a whole bunch of gibberish that the computer reads and gives you a perfect score.</p>
<p>Maybe they look for statistically improbable word combinations, and if there are too many of those phrases, it figures you're just writing "Words, words, words," as Hamlet so eloquently put it.</p>
<p>If it's a hand-written essay, forget machine scoring. Can't happen, won't work. Trust me, I've been in the machine reading industry for years. It would be an incredibly leap of technology -- sort of on the order of solar cell energy becoming cheaper than petro-energy.</p>
<p>I invite anyone who thinks this in the works to post links to the relevant sources and I'll take a look into it.</p>
<p>I think you have to be more specific about what won't work about machine scoring. If you're saying that machines can't read handwriting (even though I highly doubt that you're saying you claim that you've been in the machine industry for years":</p>
<p>"Additionally, machines with a recent Optical Character Recognition (OCR) upgrade have the capability to read the address information, including handwritten, and sort the mail based on local or outgoing ZIP codes."</p>
<p>I know wikipedia might not be reliable, but if there's that much detailed information then it is highly likely that you can find credible information somewhere else.</p>
<p>The only point of concern is that machines do not have reasoning ability and therefore people wonder how they can grade a paper. Literature and art is highly meaningful in some ways that a machine cannot decipher.</p>
<p>take a look at this article:</p>