The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
nytimes.com
The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
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Re: The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
#2If it's ok for them to use an algorithm to grade essays then it would be ok for students to use an algorithm to write the papers no? How is it different from using a calculator? it's a tool right? mathematics used to only be only pen and paper. (I know it says it would still be graded by people, I'm making a point)
Writing is an artform and as such should be treated and graded as one. Sometimes you need to use language that is grammatically incorrect to get a point across and software is not nuanced enough to pick up on this. I can see this helping to turn out students that are good grammaticians but terrible writers - optimizing for the wrong outcome.
Re: The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
#3Giving students close access to a program that evaluates essays many times would be the worst possible thing to do. People are generally very good at adapting to systems, and the algorithm would break down pretty quickly as people find out which factors it favors and which ones it penalises (while human graders are arguably less strict in their criteria and can hence recognize these attempts at writing to the letter).
Re: The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
#4If it's ok for them to use an algorithm to grade essays then it would be ok for students to use an algorithm to write the papers no? How is it different from using a calculator? it's a tool right? mathematics used to only be only pen and paper. (I know it says it would still be graded by people, I'm making a point) Writing is an artform and as such should be treated and graded as one. Sometimes you need to use langua…
The evaluations are on "how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders." As long as some humans are always included as a control, this shouldn't be too big of a problem.
Re: The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
#5Giving students close access to a program that evaluates essays many times would be the worst possible thing to do. People are generally very good at adapting to systems, and the algorithm would break down pretty quickly as people find out which factors it favors and which ones it penalises (while human graders are arguably less strict in their criteria and can hence recognize these attempts at writing to the letter)…
This inevitably leads to an arms race, with the students and software getting better and better. At some point, sufficiently advanced gaming of essay scores is indistinguishable from students who naturally write well by following the rules which lead to good writing. As long as creativity and originality aren't sacrificed, is it really a problem?
Re: The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
#6I think this says more about the assignment and the human grading procedures than anything else. Even the supposedly creative sections in standardized tests are surprisingly narrow in what they consider to be good.
Re: The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
#7If it's ok for them to use an algorithm to grade essays then it would be ok for students to use an algorithm to write the papers no? How is it different from using a calculator? it's a tool right? mathematics used to only be only pen and paper. (I know it says it would still be graded by people, I'm making a point) Writing is an artform and as such should be treated and graded as one. Sometimes you need to use langua…
I upvoted you for the interesting line of thought, although I disagree with the premise that acceptability of grading algorithmically implies acceptability of writing algorithmically.
In CS, we often grade assignments automatically, although we expect students to write the assignments by hand. Although there are many classes where this would be a bad idea, there are some where it works quite well - if the problems are strictly specified, grading an assignment with what are effectively unit tests is reasonable.
Grading and doing an assignment are different classes of problems - roughly mapping to decision problems and search problems. Just because the grading is computationally tractable or acceptable does not necessarily imply that the act of writing the assignment is.
I agree with your second paragraph by and large. There is a time and place for automatic grading, and most writing should not fall into that category.
Re: The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
#8If it's ok for them to use an algorithm to grade essays then it would be ok for students to use an algorithm to write the papers no? How is it different from using a calculator? it's a tool right? mathematics used to only be only pen and paper. (I know it says it would still be graded by people, I'm making a point) Writing is an artform and as such should be treated and graded as one. Sometimes you need to use langua…
For the standardized test discussed in the article, it says the human graders gave three minutes, on average, to reading each essay. These tests are not wanting art. Writing one of these essays is no more art than writing a basic linked list implementation. It's not concerned with how good a writer a kid is, but that the kid can write at all.
Edit: basically, the sheer scale of the grading required for a standardized test means that it's never going to be a real test of writing skills. It wouldn't surprise me if overly skilled writing is actually a negative even with the human grader—I could easily see a rushed grader misreading something clever and giving it a low score.
(The wisdom or effectiveness of these tests in the first place is a whole different discussion.)
Re: The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
#9If it's ok for them to use an algorithm to grade essays then it would be ok for students to use an algorithm to write the papers no? How is it different from using a calculator? it's a tool right? mathematics used to only be only pen and paper. (I know it says it would still be graded by people, I'm making a point) Writing is an artform and as such should be treated and graded as one. Sometimes you need to use langua…
(disclaimer - I work at Kaggle)
I would recommend downloading the dataset[1] and taking a look at some of the essays. There is a tendency for an educated audience to (justifiably) worry about exactly what you've articulated, but when you read through the essays, you get an appreciation of how valuable a tool like this could be. These are elementary and middle school essays rife with rudimentary mistakes (which are at times extremely charming) and generally not filled with subtle arguments prone to misinterpretation.
If algorithms can help every seventh grader in the country write a solid 5 paragraph essay, that's progress.
Re: The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay
#10Giving students close access to a program that evaluates essays many times would be the worst possible thing to do. People are generally very good at adapting to systems, and the algorithm would break down pretty quickly as people find out which factors it favors and which ones it penalises (while human graders are arguably less strict in their criteria and can hence recognize these attempts at writing to the letter)…
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