Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
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Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#2[deleted]
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#3“In most machine scoring states, any of the randomly selected essays with wide discrepancies between human and machine scores are referred to another human for review”.
And “between 5 to 20 percent” of essays are randomly selected for human review.
So the takeaway is that if you’re one of the 80-95% of (typically black or female) people who the machine scored dramatically lower, but are not selected for human review, your education future is systematically fucked and you have no knowledge of why or how to change it.
Absolutely reprehensible. Anyone involved in the creation or adoption of these systems should be ashamed.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#4Unlike a multiple choice test where the primary audience is automated graders, the primary audience for an essay is other humans. If even Google and Facebook with their billions of dollars and billions of posts worth of data, still cannot always understand the intent and purpose of written content, what hope do these algorithms have?
If it is cost-prohibitive for every essay to be graded by humans, then they should be dropped from the tests. Otherwise, we are missing the whole point of essays which is to communicate effectively with another human, not just match certain text patterns.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#5While this is already terrible, I’m aware of a few project that are trying to do the same with scientific literature. Basically they are trying to train models for scoring literatures based on their quality, novelty and what not. At the current rate and state of AI, I cannot ever imagine this is going to work.
It was a few weeks ago that someone shared “The Dark Age of AI” on HN [1]. I think we are promising way over what Drew McDermott thought we would not going to promise. This is to the extend that we are applying AI on assessing Art, Creativity and even quality and novelty of Science, something that in a way we don’t even understand (or trying to understand) ourselves at the time that we are publishing it.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#6I imagine that any student that experimented with the form of the essay or wrote an exceptionally well argued piece in simple language would not have their test graded appropriately either.
Any essay writing test which could be adequately graded by a machine is not testing anything of value.
Edit: I’ll further add that as soon as people’s careers depend on a metric, the metric becomes useless as a metric, because it will be gamed and manipulated by everyone involved. Almost nobody involved is incentivized to accurately measure student’s writing ability.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#7“In most machine scoring states, any of the randomly selected essays with wide discrepancies between human and machine scores are referred to another human for review”. And “between 5 to 20 percent” of essays are randomly selected for human review. So the takeaway is that if you’re one of the 80-95% of (typically black or female) people who the machine scored dramatically lower, but are not selected for human review,…
The thing is, you could be similarly screwed by a biased human whose grading is not checked by a less biased human.
At least the machines offer the following hope: even if unbiased humans are rare among paper-grading teachers, those humans can be used to train the machines, so then bias-free or lower-bias grading becomes more ubiquitous.
Basically, the system has the potential for systematically identifying and reducing systematic bias. A computer program can be retrained much more readily than nation-wide army of humans. Humans can be given a lecture on bias, and then they will just return to their ways.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#8Unlike a multiple choice test where the primary audience is automated graders, the primary audience for an essay is other humans. If even Google and Facebook with their billions of dollars and billions of posts worth of data, still cannot always understand the intent and purpose of written content, what hope do these algorithms have? If it is cost-prohibitive for every essay to be graded by humans, then they should b…
> If it is cost-prohibitive for every essay to be graded by humans, then they should be dropped from the tests.
Apparently it is. But everyone still wants writing to be assessed…
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#9This is my first time learning that AI-graded essays are a thing. Am I the only one who thinks that's insane? I feel like you'd probably have to have an AGI to meaningfully evaluate an essay.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#10Because a (likely unsophisticated) algorithm is grading the essays, there's probably a deterministic method to do score well.
This seems like a terrible idea.
It's not a stretch to imagine the opportunity for nefarious behavior this allows - think of the recent college admission scandals, and how happy they'd be to have a guise of algorithmic indifference'.
If used long-term, it could offer a big advantage to the wealthy in other avenues. Another hypothetical, probably not far from reality: the algorithm becomes solved (almost or completely) by some premier 'tutoring' company. Said company can charge a pretty penny given its stellar track record, offering yet another hidden advantage to the wealthy/elite.