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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

#191

Post by wickedsickeune »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #152
dahart wrote: post #133

> 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.

I have often solved many hard math problems with very unconventional solutions (eg geometrical proof for algebraic problems). Trust me, a piece of software is decades away from being able to accurately determine the future of children and massively impact their self esteem / trust in society.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#192

Post by rocqua »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #63
Spivak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I came first in English for my school, many moons ago. Leading up to the finals, I regularly finished ahead of the hard core the English essay people, generally to my amusement. My exam essay responses were generally half the length (sometimes even shorter) than the prodigious writers. Although I've an ok vocabulary, I always made sure I made the right choice of word to hit a specific meaning, rather than choosing wo…

It seems plausible that, under this system, you would eventually have learned to write longer essays. To my mind, that would be a school teaching you to be worse.

In fact, throughout the article I kept being surprised by the idea that long is good. When writing, I tend to prefer being brief.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#193

Post by rocqua »

anigbrowl wrote: post #19
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.

Sure, have less essay test questions, and start grading them for content not form.

If you want to grade on form to test the ability to write correct rather than coherent sentences, make those separate questions, and mark them so.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#194

Post by ptah »

shkkmo wrote: post #55
Spivak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Adding further bias against the underprivileged is not "cool". Implenting this while avoiding publicity or providing a means to publically audit the results is doubly not cool. It is fine to play with "cool" techniques when you are doing consequence free stuff like playing Mario. When you are creating systems that have significant and long term effects of people's lives a different standard applies.

research needs to be done on bias correction. it will then be better than human where you cannot correct the bias

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#195

Post by yoz-y »

dahart wrote: post #133

> 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…

> Turns out the instructions said the essay would be scored on verbal efficiency; getting the point across clearly with the fewest words. I started playing around and realized that the more words I added, the higher the score, whether they were relevant or grammatical or not.

Frankly, this does not change anything from my experience in school decades ago. The teachers always said that the length does not matter and we should not pad the papers. However students who wrote more pages got better scores every single time.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#196

Post by rocqua »

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…

There is value in the ability to produce correct English 'off the cuff'. You could argue essays are the best way to get students to produce off the cuff written text. Hence, it makes some sense to ask students for essays, and then judge those essays only for form.

However, it is rather important that students know their essays are not judged as essays, but only judged on the content. Otherwise you teach students that form trumps content in essays.

When judging an essay as an essay correct English barely matters. What matters is how convincing you are, and how interesting of a read the essay is. This is a great skill to have, and testing it also makes sense. Really though, we should separate these two forms of testing.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#197

Post by de_watcher »

piokoch wrote: post #181
dahart wrote: post #133

> 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…

Frankly, I can't believe what I am reading. The idea that some "AI" grades essays automatically is idiotic and has nothing to do with education. Where is the place for discussions? Where is the place for ideas confrontation? Where is the place for writing style development? How this AI is supposed to grade things like repetitions (that can be either good rhetorical tool or a mistake, depending on context), etc? Who t…

I can't believe either, it's completely ridiculous. They're basically claiming that they've developed a general AI. It's like some part of population is living in different fantasy worlds and makes policy decisions accordingly.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#198

Post by robinwassen »

I am working with reducing the time teachers spend on exams and assessments. I have access to a cleaned and manually scored dataset of 550k essays that is exponentially growing. Looked at creating at a model based on this dataset to automatically score essays with NLP parameters such as grammar, structure, spelling, word complexity, sentiment, relative text length etc.

The problem that I encountered was actually how to apply it in a useful way, since the problems mentioned in the article are quite obvious when you design the model.

Options that I saw:

1. Use it as autonomous grading with optional review by the teacher, see the linked article for the problems with this.

2. Use it as a sanity check on the teachers manual scoring, but it would not reduce the work load and probably just undermine the teacher.

Do you have any suggestions for how such a model could be applied in a practical and ethical way?

Had some thoughts on how to measure actual knowledge about a subject, but that would require a massive knowledge graph which would introduce a huge amount of complexity just to see if it would be a feasible approach.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#199

Post by alexanderdmitri »

analyst74 wrote: post #153
dahart wrote: post #133

> 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…

Think from a positive angle, students today are learning useful life skills to game computer systems, which they will have to deal with when they grow up. edit: ...just like how previous generations have to learn how to game social systems.

Except the algorithm being gamed can change suddenly, drastically and without the gamer's knowledge.

When such changes occur, the gamer will be docked until they can reverse-engineer the new algorithm. There's also the risk that all their previous inputs "gaming" the system might be reconsumed to terrible results as well, effectively rewriting their historical performance disasterously.

As always, those with the social standing and power to have insider knowledge or guidance will be in the best position to profit off such systems.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#200

Post by mschuster91 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #186
mschuster91 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? The positives must be evaluated by a human anyway.

Who cares? The people whose lives are ruined by being mis-identified by the system. The positives must be evaluated by a human anyway. Those same people whose lack of competence people are bemoaning throughout these comments.

> The people whose lives are ruined by being mis-identified by the system.

When a child writes "daddy touches me between the legs" in an essay, it doesn't matter if a human spots it or an AI that forwards it to a human, this needs to be investigated either way.

> Those same people whose lack of competence people are bemoaning throughout these comments.

It's not a lack of competence that's bemoaned, it's a massive amount of understaffing (and resulting overwork) in teachers and other school resources, as well as a drastic lack of financing because it's easy to cut budgets for schools for politicians as the effects only show up two decades afterwards.

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