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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

#211

Post by raxxorrax »

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…

You have automated systems that rate essays without any human actually reading them?

Kids, forget everything you know because crime does indeed pay off. Best grades will be reserved for those that try to cheat this system however it is implemented. Botting your essays is the way to go in the 21st century.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#212

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

mlyle wrote: post #168
kwhitefoot wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the false positive rate is likely to be?

Depends upon what false negative rate you're willing to tolerate. ;) And I don't know how good of a signal there is. This is pure handwaving. But this type of thing seems like the exact kind of spooky correlation that ML is good at spotting compared to humans.

Machine learning techniques are going to be absolutely awful in detecting something like this, the reason being it's exceedingly rare (at least I'm guessing it is; if we're talking about child sexual abuse by one's own parents, it sure sounds extremely unlikely- but even child abuse in general is probably rare [1]). Machine learning systems are awful at identifying rare events. Like the OP seems to suggest, the false positive rate would most likely be very high.

"Spooky" machine learning results happen when a correlation is abundant in a dataset [2]. Otherwise, machine learning techniques will probably miss it altogether.

______________

[1] Quick online search: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/blogs/healthy_kids/What-is-t...

[2] The archetypal spooky machine learning story is surely the one about Target sending baby item coupos to a girl in high school before her father knowing she was pregnant:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#214

Post by tonyedgecombe »

mschuster91 wrote: post #200
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amo…

Sprinkling some AI over it won't fix those issues, I'd argue it will make them worse as people blindly accept the results.

There were some cases in the UK about a decade ago where bugs in software the Royal Mail was using led to incorrect accusations of fraud. People actually went to jail over this, it took years to resolve.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#215

Post by rvense »

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.

It is absolutely insane. By no definition does the system understand what is written.

You could ask a student to write an essay taking a firm opinion on some subject, and they could change standpoint every paragraph and there's no way these systems would know.

If I was a student I would be extremely offended at people wasting my time like this.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#216

Post by christophilus »

nraynaud wrote: post #163
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…

wait, you get the score in real time? Like some kind of objective function you can train a machine to maximise on?

Heh heh. I like the way you think. Hackers of Utah unite!

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#217

Post by wisty »

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…

Teachers often score by similarly sensible criteria.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#218

Post by ejk314 »

c3534l wrote: post #149
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…

It's be easier and equally fair to just grade student's essays by rolling a pair of dice.

It's arguably more fair. At least purely random scoring doesn't incentivize cheating.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#219

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

I went to high school in Utah, long before this automated scoring. It sounds awful but considering the quality of the education I received there perhaps not that bad after all.

My best Utah education anecdote - In the first day of British literature class the teacher came in and asked "Does anyone here know what A.D means?" someone said After Death - she said no. I figured this was my time to shine so I raised my eager hand and said "Anno Domini, in the year of the lord" - she said no.

Then she announced: "A.D means after the Deluge, and B.C means before Christ".

She also totally lied to me one time about whether she would be considering a particular textbook question as applying to Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.

Anyway I think that was one of the many classes I got an F in after stopped going and would walk past it every day on my way to play chess with my German teacher.

Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

#220

Post by crankylinuxuser »

thombat wrote: post #185
dagw wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that soon or later people will learn how to game that AI. Already been done. http://lesperelman.com/writing-assessment-robo-grading/babel... Here's a sample essay that is complete nonsense and got a perfect score on the GRE. http://lesperelman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/6-6_ScoreI...

The final paragraph from that example is steaming gibberish that nobody could mistake for English: "Calling has not, and undoubtedly never will be aggravating in the way we encounter mortification but delineate the reprimand that should be inclination. Nonetheless, armed with the knowledge that the analysis augurs stealth with propagandists, almost all of the utterances on my authorization journey. Since sanctions ar…

The let me posit another idea...

There's 2 ways of finding out these artifacts of AI essay grading: pure luck, and being able to afford extensive test-prep (rich).

The luck one can't be accounted for. So I im lead to believe that the purpose of these essays and their AI grading is to find and escalate rich people.

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