Robo-Readers

                Although much advancement has occurred in the field of automatic grading of student essays, there are simply too many issues with the program to use it on a wide scale. With our current technology, a robot can’t think. They can’t feel the emotion that a paper evokes as a part of an argument, nor appreciate the truth.

                Eliminating the human element in grading papers has come an extraordinary way. In A Win for the Robo-Readers, the author quotes a study by the Hewlett Foundation. They said that in a study of 22,000 short essays, the computer scores were comparable to that of human scores. This was an incredible accomplishment; however, it is important to realize that these were essays written to be graded by a human reader, not a machine. According to Michael Winerip in Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfruscating Mellifluously, the system has too many flaws. Les Perelman, a director of writing at MIT says that test prep can easily fool the system. When teachers and students learn the preferences of the machine, writing will be transformed into something mechanical. Instead of improving the writing of students everywhere, the Robo-Reader has the potential to seriously harm the English Language.

                One of the most troublesome flaws is the inability of a machine to “be human.” Scoring no longer is based on a solid argument, but according to the official website of the inventing company, it relies on a “content analysis based on vocabulary measures” as well as a series of grammatical test. This all sounds great in theory, but when dealing with rhetorical strategies that stray at all from the “proper use of the English Language,” the Robo-Reader utterly fails. Some of the greatest authors of all time utilize fragments and short paragraphs to solidify and emphasize their points, but with these new computer programs, these are automatically wrong. According to Michael Winerip in an interview by Melissa Block, the substance of the argument is not important as long as the computer thinks you are arguing well. He says “You could say that the war of 1812 started in 1945” and as long as this “fact” is incorporated into a well-structured argument, “there are all kinds of things you could say that have little or nothing to do with reality that could receive a high score.”

                This in itself is a major flaw in the program, but by viewing the so called “feedback” given by the computer, the hole is ripped even wider. The computer is looking for a specified length and a few specific terms to give a grade, but in reality, this is just a small part of writing. A solid argument can be incorporated in a much shorter or longer paper than the machine deems satisfactory.  By trying to grade papers this way, machines are pushing us not to think even more. Standardized tests and grading are no way to learn, instead, we must push creativity and outside the box thought: two things that machines are incapable of understanding.

                Although the thought of letting machines grade papers is tempting, it is simply idealistic. There are too many flaws in the way that they grade and could hurt the English Language as a whole. Nothing can replace humans in a job that requires high level, creative thought.