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Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

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Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#11

Post by kazinator »

empath75 wrote: post #6

I 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…

I think machines could be valuable in giving feedback on writing, like that grammarly.com.

A lot of what students write is actually garbage from that point of view. Even if they happen to have a good basic idea about what they want to say, the point of essay writing is to master the mechanics of expression so that you get the idea across effectively.

Whether the student has a brilliant idea isn't even so important, and it wouldn't even be fair; imagine if high school computer science expected students to turn in a best-selling app for a term project. Not everyone can come up with something brilliant to say; and even relatively mundane lines of reasoning can be given a good treatment in writing to develop the skill.

I remember when I had essays graded in school, a lot of the comments were low-grade fluff like "run on sentence", "wrong word", "faulty parallelism", "missing colon before 'for example'" and such points having nothing to do with the content being original, well-considered and well-argued. That sort of thing might as well be done by machine, at least as a preprocessing step to improve a student's rough draft.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#12

Post by HarryHirsch »

empath75 wrote: post #6

I 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…

Almost nobody involved is incentivized to accurately measure student’s writing ability

It's the same reason you see keyword posters in math education. "Together" means "plus", that kind of thing. It's completely worthless, except for one-step problems, and even then it doesn't always work. What is happening is collusion between teachers and testmakers. You can't teach understanding, but you can teach test-passing techniques because the way the test is set permits this.

You see the same thing here, in English you can get away with not teaching quality writing if you teach techniques to score well.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#13

Post by risubramanian »

saagarjha wrote: post #8
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Unlike 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…

The SAT dropped the writing section a few years ago, and many schools don't care about the GRE writing score.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#14

Post by _delirium »

drngdds wrote: post #9

This 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.

I work in AI, and was very surprised when I heard about this (a few years ago). I don't think anyone who works in the area thinks the tech is ready for this kind of deployment. There is research on the subject [1], and NLP systems can do better than baseline methods, but the error rates are still pretty high.

A thing you quickly find if you try to download off-the-shelf NLP tools and apply them to anything is how little is reliable at all, unless you can constrain the domain. Even basic topic identification only works with low error rates when constrained to something like NYT stories, or PubMed abstracts, not arbitrary text by arbitrary writers. And I would bet ETS is using worse tech than research state-of-the-art.

[1] e.g. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P15-1053

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#15

Post by VikingCoder »

My mother worked grading standardized tests. It was a hellish job for many reasons (limited breaks, etc.)

One question she had to grade was essentially, "What's something you want your teacher to know about you?"

It was an essay answer, and she was supposed to grade it on grammar, etc. Just the mechanical aspects of writing. (The real question explained the details more, but that was the core of the question.)

She saw answers that would make you weep.

"My daddy touches me."

"I haven't eaten today. I don't know when I'm going to eat again."

Stuff like that.

And my mother was going to be the only human who ever saw their responses. Their teacher had no chance to see their responses, just my mom.

So she goes to her supervisor and asks, "What can we do to help these kids?"

The supervisor said there was nothing you can do. Just grade the answers.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#16

Post by [deleted] »

crispcarb wrote: post #10

Because 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 wea…

[deleted]

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#17

Post by gibolt »

kazinator wrote: post #7
jakear wrote: post #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,…

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 reduc…

AI has a lot more potential for bias than humans. It depends on the input data which is likely heavily biased based on other data set results like face detection. It will only amplify any small bias present in the data.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#19

Post by anigbrowl »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Unlike 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 then then maybe we should adjust the economic model, not abandon the measurement.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#20

Post by rhexs »

VikingCoder wrote: post #15

My mother worked grading standardized tests. It was a hellish job for many reasons (limited breaks, etc.) One question she had to grade was essentially, "What's something you want your teacher to know about you?" It was an essay answer, and she was supposed to grade it on grammar, etc. Just the mechanical aspects of writing. (The real question explained the details more, but that was the core of the question.) She sa…

Or...report it to the police? I’d gladly risk my job to do the right thing in that instance.
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