151–160 of 302 posts
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They did drop the writing but replaced it with an optional essay. Most upper tier schools require applicants to take the essay.
Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and many other schools do NOT require applicants to take the SAT essay.
> Utah has been using AI as the primary scorer on its standardized tests for several years. “It was a major cost to our state to hand score, in addition to very time consuming,” said Cydnee Carter, the state’s assessment development coordinator. The automated process also allowed the state to give immediate feedback to students and teachers, she said. Yes, education takes time and costs money. Yes, not educating is b…
> Utah has been using AI as the primary scorer on its standardized tests for several years. “It was a major cost to our state to hand score, in addition to very time consuming,” said Cydnee Carter, the state’s assessment development coordinator. The automated process also allowed the state to give immediate feedback to students and teachers, she said. Yes, education takes time and costs money. Yes, not educating is b…
edit: ...just like how previous generations have to learn how to game social systems.
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…
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.
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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.
False accusations can actually be the result of prior abuse. They may substitute one person for another. Or do things as a result of mental illness caused by abuse. Kids think differently to adults and may behave inexplicably. And unfortunately that means that an abused child is a terrible witness.
As a child you're really not prepared for the concept that your parents are treating you badly. So that realization doesn't come until much later.
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Do you just get to keep submitting the essay to see what score it will get before you turn it in? That sounds like a bigger problem than any of the particulars about how the grading is done.
In this case, there was a limit to the number of times the essay could be submitted, and there was a required score that needed to be obtained within that limit, otherwise the grade would go down. The limit was something like 20 tries, and when I got there they’d already used maybe 14 of them. I could perhaps see value in having unlimited tries, as a teaching aid, if the result wasn’t being used for grading. That wou…
Teachers are extremely overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. I'm not surprised that it was easy to convince them to offload the difficult and time-consuming work of manually grading essays. This also means they don't have to deal with complaints about unfair grading. A machine did it and it's out of their hands.
> Utah has been using AI as the primary scorer on its standardized tests for several years. “It was a major cost to our state to hand score, in addition to very time consuming,” said Cydnee Carter, the state’s assessment development coordinator. The automated process also allowed the state to give immediate feedback to students and teachers, she said. Yes, education takes time and costs money. Yes, not educating is b…
Every essay I wrote, I'd always force myself to reach the max "12.0" grade level. While writing I'd struggle over word choice, sentence structure, rearranging paragraphs, working on my tone etc, all in pursuit of the 12th grade way to phrase things. All my revisions were subject to the approval of the Grade Level checker.
Whenever I could I would check the grade levels of my friend's writing - usually by showing them a "neat feature" they could enable. Then, I'd smugly applaud myself for being the better writer whenever their grade level was below 12.0.
The Grade Level feature fascinated me and to try and master it, I found a book about Microsoft Word and looked through it in a bookstore. I was absolutely gobsmacked at how simple the formulas was. I had childishly been expecting something, like perhaps Utah educators imagine they have. I genuinely expected the method to be complex beyond my understanding.
Instead, Word used a variant of Flesch-Kincaid. There was a direct relationship between sentence length and grade score, and polysyllabic words and grade score. Meaning, the longer your sentences and words, the higher your grade score.
As soon as I got home from the bookstore I loaded a draft of something I had written. It was "pre-12.0" writing from me. I simply deleted all the periods but one and checked again. 12.0.
Automatic grading is a wonderful lure. It's nice to imagine that there's some objective writing quality easy to tap into. At the moment, I think we're far from that ability.
Personally, I feel the solution to insufficient teacher time is to use peer grading much more, and spot checks. Get kids to read and revise each other's works frequently, and teachers should aim to grade at least N papers per student where N is much less than the number of papers a student writes.
Revising is a really vital part of writing. Getting more chances to do revision, plus having to write something good enough to show your peers, plus having the risk of any paper count for your grade should compensate for incomplete teacher grading.
> Utah has been using AI as the primary scorer on its standardized tests for several years. “It was a major cost to our state to hand score, in addition to very time consuming,” said Cydnee Carter, the state’s assessment development coordinator. The automated process also allowed the state to give immediate feedback to students and teachers, she said. Yes, education takes time and costs money. Yes, not educating is b…
Wow this is pretty shocking. I can understand using automated systems for something like math problems, it makes sense. There’s (usually) one right answer. But essays? This should be banned.
Note: This is not hyperbole, I have seen this exact scenario more than once.
There may be a place for a well-designed one, but if it exists, I've never seen it.
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In a forum of CS people I'm surprised this is one of the top opinions. Our field is full of super surprising results like this -- that you don't have to actually understand the text at beyond basic grammar structures to reasonably accurately predict the score a human would give it. Like this kind of thing should be cool , not insane. I mean wasn't it cool in your AI class when you learned that DFS could play Mario if…
Based on the title alone, how would you feel if you were given bad marks due to flawed black box?
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 feel like you'd probably have to have an AGI to meaningfully evaluate an essay. So the reason this isn't the case, is because there are very simple metrics that tend to highly correlate with essay quality. It doesn't mean the grading-bot is actually evaluating essay quality. It's just looking for properties that are statistically associated with good essays. Remember, at the end of the day as long as the bot's ra…
This is related to current fairness-in-AI discussions. In many cases the basic problem is ML systems leverage correlations for making causal decisions. Here, there is a huge ethical difference between scoring a person based on "is this a good essay" and "do the features of this essay correlate with features of good essays". Just like there is a huge fairness and discrimination difference between "is this person qualified for a loan" and "do the features of this person correlate with features of people who qualify for loans" (algorithmic redlining). Your last sentence has a big discrimination/fairness issue also, since you are testing even more for parental income and parental free time.