Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

Post by Spivak » Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 12:28 AM UTC

HarryHirsch wrote: post #12

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…

Almost nobody involved is incentivized to accurately measure student’s writing ability It's the same reason you see keyword posters in math education. "Together" means "plus", that kind of thing. It's completely worthless, except for one-step problems, and even then it doesn't always work. What is happening is collusion between teachers and testmakers. You can't teach understanding, but you can teach test-passing tec…

Post by aidenn0 » Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 12:29 AM UTC

crispcarb wrote: post #10

Because a (likely unsophisticated) algorithm is grading the essays, there's probably a deterministic method to do score well. This seems like a terrible idea. It's not a stretch to imagine the opportunity for nefarious behavior this allows - think of the recent college admission scandals, and how happy they'd be to have a guise of algorithmic indifference'. If used long-term, it could offer a big advantage to the wea…

Post by Larrikin » Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #30

gibolt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has a lot more potential for bias than humans. It depends on the input data which is likely heavily biased based on other data set results like face detection. It will only amplify any small bias present in the data.

It's amazing to see how the general opinion of CS people has completely shifted in the last few years from "algorithmic scoring is important in removing the bias from human graders" to the exact opposite.

Post by topologistics » Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

Hitton wrote: post #27

jakear wrote: post #3

“In most machine scoring states, any of the randomly selected essays with wide discrepancies between human and machine scores are referred to another human for review”. And “between 5 to 20 percent” of essays are randomly selected for human review. So the takeaway is that if you’re one of the 80-95% of (typically black or female) people who the machine scored dramatically lower, but are not selected for human review,…

>So the takeaway is that if you’re one of the 80-95% of (typically black or female) people who the machine scored dramatically lower It's quite funny how are some people manipulated to think that society and especially education is somehow biased against minorities or women when opposite is true[1][2]. [1] https://www.studyinternational.com/news/record-high-numbers-... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ame…

Post by peteradio » Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 12:34 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #26

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.

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…