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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

#121

Post by harry8 »

mxcrossb wrote: post #66
harry8 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these will be 100% true as well. But don't make the mistake that there are no kids who go for shock value or are wantonly manipulative when they know it can't come back to them. So how many are true and how many false? I have no clue. Literally none. And no it doesn't make me feel any better about the screams of existential agony even if that were a low percentage. Could be high too.

I don’t know about calling it manipulative. I remember taking the ACT, and struggling to plan out one of my essays. It was something like “tell us about a book that inspired you”. So I changed details about the plot so it all fit nicely and was easy to write. I can see something similar here, where someone takes on a persona when writing in order to effectively communicate.

That's entirely fair. Manipulation is kind of what a writer does yet the word manipulative has perjoritive connotations. Many types of writing don't have literal truth as any kind of pre-requisite. Others make a pretence of literal truth to achieve greater effect then basically lie, many autobiographies fall into this trap to some degree. All these things. Differential empathy. Data quality matters.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#122

Post by jkdufair »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #101
_delirium wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's completely possible I'm not fully up on recent progress, especially since a bunch of stuff seems to have moved in the past 6 months. But I haven't seen any general models that can solve open-domain problems, without specifically retraining on each domain. Do you have any pointers? E.g. a single pretrained BERT model that can reliably extract topics from: tweets, paragraphs from 19th-century novels, mathematics j…

In production problems that I work on, we don’t even really use things from within the past year. These problems are just incredibly well-solved with fairly vanilla LSTM networks from 2-3 years ago. Enough so that while it’s probably premature for fully automated essay grading, it’s not _crazy_ to make a product from models trained to solve this problem.

I have a grant where were are doing just that. Implementing more or less SOTA research using fairly vanilla LSTM networks from 2-3 years ago (primarily Taghipour & Ng) to provide low stakes feedback to students on their essays in one of our teaching tools at Purdue. It’s based on research using the Kaggle ASAP database and we have found it to be pretty accurate across a variety of domains in early testing. Though some essay prompts seem to do better with CNNs vs. RNNs. I doubt many of the systems in TFA are based on LSTMs or neural nets at all. They are probably doing regression on hand-crafted features.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#123

Post by SoylentYellow »

VikingCoder wrote: post #39
rhexs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What my mom saw had an ID number on it. No other demographics. And she was grading from multiple states. So do what? Contact her local police? With a written accusation from a child? Is that enough to get a warrant to force the company to release the demographic information? And people don't work at a job like that because they want to. They work there because they need the money. Everything she took in and out of th…

> So do what? Contact her local police?

> With a written accusation from a child? Is that enough to get a warrant to force the company to release the demographic information?

Yes, she should have absolutely went to the local police. A child's first hand account in writing of child abuse and neglect is slam dunk evidence to secure a warrant to link the essay ID to the individual child.

> Everything she took in and out of there was monitored, too. So it's not like she can go to the Xerox, and walk out of there with a copy.

Doesn't matter. She could have went to the police herself as a witness. That alone would be enough for a probable cause warrant to retrieve the essays.

It is very sad she saw these signs of abuse and did not report it.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#124

Post by DATACOMMANDER »

bendbro wrote: post #110
shaggyfrog wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Punch up, not down.

Do you suspect this is a one off mistake or do you think you make repeated mistakes of this kind? I'm always worried I'm doing some particular thing, interpersonally, repeatedly, but I fail to notice.

That’s what you’re doing wrong.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#125

Post by Meekro »

shkkmo wrote: post #67
Meekro wrote: post #40

From the article: " All essays scored by E-rater are also graded by a human and discrepancies are sent to a second human for a final grade. Because of that system, ETS does not believe any students have been adversely affected by the bias detected in E-rater."

Also from the article: > Of those 21 states, three said every essay is also graded by a human. But in the remaining 18 states, only a small percentage of students’ essays—it varies between 5 to 20 percent—will be randomly selected for a human grader to double check the machine’s work. So that applies only in a minority of cases.

Oops, my mistake! That's worse than I thought!

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#126

Post by lopmotr »

fzeroracer wrote: post #109
lopmotr wrote: post #90

I wish this machine bias wasn't always presented in such divisive terms as race and "disadvantaged groups". It can affect anybody. If you happened to develop a writing style that looks like typical bad essay writers' style, then you could be hurt by bias in the grading.

If an image processing algorithm fails to recognize black people or worse, profiles them, how else should this be described but in terms of race? If you don't talk about the actual problem, how can you possibly expect to solve it?

There are many classes of people who have problems of discrimination. Short, ugly, ginger, etc. The intersections of all those classes are so numerous that everybody will have some disadvantage. But it won't be apparent unless you define their class and measure it.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#127

Post by bendbro »

DATACOMMANDER wrote: post #124
bendbro wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you suspect this is a one off mistake or do you think you make repeated mistakes of this kind? I'm always worried I'm doing some particular thing, interpersonally, repeatedly, but I fail to notice.

That’s what you’re doing wrong.

Thus aren't you as well?

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#128

Post by chrisdsaldivar »

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.

We had this in my school for 8th and 9th grade so 2008-2010. We had to type the essays in class and submit by the end of the hour. I would only get maybe 3 paragraphs in before time was up because I was trying to build a strong argument for the prompts. Despite that I would usually get 3-4/6 and my teacher said she would read the essays and regrade but she never actually did. My friend literally copy and pasted the pledge of allegiance 20-30 times and scored a perfect 6/6. Later we found out if you repeated the words in the writing prompt you would get a guaranteed 5/6 and with a high enough word count you’d get 6/6. The essays were all bullshit and just a way for the teachers to get an extra free period once a week.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#129

Post by stochastic_monk »

dmoy wrote: post #82
harry8 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these will be 100% true as well. But don't make the mistake that there are no kids who go for shock value or are wantonly manipulative when they know it can't come back to them. So how many are true and how many false? I have no clue. Literally none. And no it doesn't make me feel any better about the screams of existential agony even if that were a low percentage. Could be high too.

For the not eating, it's pretty easy to get data. It's like 1 in 5 children live in food-insecure households in the US and maybe 1 in 20 of those very insecure, so not eating before school provided lunch is common enough that if you're grading tons of papers you'll run into kids like that.

It could also be a student suffering from anorexia nervosa, which the confessional aspects of the essay would fit well with.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#130

Post by analog31 »

waynecochran wrote: post #70

I would like to see how it scored on essays by great writers. “Sorry Mr Tolkien, I’m afraid you have to go to community college first.”

In my state, it's going to be "Sorry Mr Tolkien, but we eliminated all of the departments that are not STEM enough."
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