More States Opting to 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays by Computer
npr.org
npr.org
> One year, she says, a student who wrote a whole page of the letter “b” ended up with a good score. Other students have figured out that they could do well writing one really good paragraph and just copying that four times to make a five-paragraph essay that scores well. Others have pulled one over on the computer by padding their essays with long quotes from the text they’re supposed to analyze, or from the question they’re supposed to answer.
The science is just not nearly there yet. We can barely determine the sentiment of IMDB reviews. How should we be able to grade an entire essay?
Working in NLP, it really bugs me when people overstate what can be done like this. It creates massive expectations that are bound to fail, and then the entire field suffers.
Its a good tool for feedback and its acceptable for a MOOC or low-cost courses as long as there are adequate disclaimers and the student's final score is determined by a properly human graded assignment or exam.
But they have to. Otherwise funding goes away.
> It creates massive expectations that are bound to fail, and then the entire field suffers.
Yes. But by then the people overstating now will have made their money and moved on.
I agree with you, but honestly companies and investors are so shallow it isn't hard to see what is going on.
> Yes. But by then the people overstating now will have made their money and moved on.
I won't be surprised if having human teachers / caregivers will be reserved for the upper classes.
This is a long standing tradition for students on pretty much every humanities essay.
These tests were all about test strategy. The written material was graded (in the 90s) by tables of people basically working a checklist for a few different things. If you had insight into how they graded (our teacher had been a grader and had our class start grading each others work when I took the class), you could get a great score even in an area where your knowledge was weak on the essay questions. Another trick was to know 3-4 general concepts from a well regarded historian to support whatever conclusion you cook up.
I think you could score these with NLP with a reduced number of humans to fine tune it. (In the 90s, I think up to 4-5 people would touch a paper) The exam would get dumbed down over time as a result as the test developers would narrow the scope of the exam to make scoring better, but I'm sure that's happening anyway as the testing vendors shave cost.
In the U.S., you take the SAT or GRE or whatever which gets graded by a mechanical turk or even an actual machine. And even the good colleges don't have the good sense to ignore the thing (the exception being MIT, at least back when I applied there, where stating your GRE score was optional when you applied as a grad). So a less than astronomical score will immediately make it impossible to get into any decent college. That system is f*cked up.
For me that meant that the only university that would have me also happened to be the university that routinely scores first or second place in international university rankings, that university being Cambridge. And I didn't get a single offer from the US because of a bad GRE score.
After getting my doctorate in NLP there, I can attest to how fucked up the idea actually is, that you can score essays using NLP.
I can highlight individual companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon... etc.) and they all use various forms of "AI" (cough) to do all sorts of human related tasks. And they do it somewhat ok for the standard case, but fail horrendously all around the edges. But the failing around the edges is an intended side effect. It costs too much to do it right, so "right now" is what's selected for.
It's also why HN, Twitter, and Facebook is the final customer support solution. That's because their customer support portals are echo chambers of "we're very sorry, but we really dont care".
That said, the SAT writing section was equally silly when graded by humans. All of the examples of what a good score looked like (per when I took it ~10 years ago) were highly formulaic, rewarding those who invested in played the game.
[0]: https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-the-SAT-test-prep-market
> Called the Babel ("Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language") Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders.
"History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation."
> One year, she says, a student who wrote a whole page of the letter "b" ended up with a good score. Other students have figured out that they could do well writing one really good paragraph and just copying that four times to make a five-paragraph essay that scores well. Others have pulled one over on the computer by padding their essays with long quotes from the text they're supposed to analyze, or from the question they're supposed to answer.
This whole thing is a nice case study for adversarial machine learning.
I can't say that I trust the original humans grading thousands of SAT essays prior to any ML assistance though.
I think you are underestimating human beings here. Sure humans would make errors, but literacy and reading comprehension are skills that all of the graders would have. If ML solutions are not recognizing obvious repetition, markov-chain text, excessive excerpts/quotations, or bbb bbbb bbbbbbb bbb bb; then it is likely that they are grading on an entirely different level of interpretation below the humans.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/sat-essay-te...
The full story is that my friend was very fluent in English (though still far from native) but did very poorly twice. I spent some time reading the company's PR and an interview with the founder and realized that they weren't even trying to grade content, only fluency.
So I advised my friend to just speak fast and constantly, even if it didn't make sense. If your story goes down a dead end, or you realize your last verb didn't match this object, don't pause, don't go back, just keep the words coming out. It worked perfectly and she aced it the third time.
The underlying problem is high-stakes testing. Remove that, and you remove the need for formulaic testing, and remove the incentive to game the testing. I'm not suggesting that means dropping rigor and consistency from the curriculum - there are other ways to achieve those, and they involve human effort i.e. talking to people. Which costs time and money.
I'm not saying it cannot be done, but it definitely is non-trivial.
If the rules become good enough at capturing good writing, then "gaming" them is the same as producing good writing!
But my teachers went out of their way to give me the opposite impression. Why do you think that was?
Your answer: 18
The answer: 18
Anyone who has taken an autograded test or two will know it has bugs. Sometimes, they don't trim (see above) or not expressed in a way that a computer determines is equivalent.
In the case in the article, we are talking about mass graded assessments, and we can see that those who have access to wealth also have access to those who can teach them to game the system. For something as small as assessments, it probably doesn't matter on an individual level - that's always been true and one of the ways that wealth keeps its statistical advantage. However, this will also creep into the poorer school districts and as that happens, this gets truly problematic.
While you are right that the point is to improve your ability to write, the feedback loop from a trained professional is a key portion of improvement. Getting students trained by machine feedback will be a further reinforcement of privilege - your writing judged by computers will become a tell-tale sign of your upbringing.
And why should one try to improve his ability to write?
Writing is for human consumption. Essays should be scored by humans.
I use a timer on my jog; a robot is measuring me! Should be a human coach? Dog food is for dogs; dogs should be manufacturing it?
Silly. Emotionally based, and valid for that aspect. But not a good logical argument.
Having kids know no one will read what they have to say is in effect telling them what they do isn't important, isn't worth the time to read...
I remember a few times when I had interesting exchanges with my teachers based on my writing, and this was certainly motivating to me.
It's like when a 3 year old draws something for you: it's objectively terrible, but you appreciate the effort, and want to encourage more of the same. What would a machine think of it?
Dog food, however, is for the benefit of dogs. At some point in the manufacturing process a dog has to taste the food, because they are supposed to eat it . Or at least a human has to make sure it smells nice, because they are supposed to buy it.
Same with essays. They are for humans to read, so humans have to test them.
In fact, why not stay at home and all interaction can take place via Google's Duplex!
The decision-makers on this seems to be both tech illiterate (or with hidden agendas) and hilariously arrogant to the point that they seem to think that epistemology is something that happens to other people.
Except that computers can do none of those things, and those three things are all much simpler tasks than critically grading a student’s essay.
Also, of course the companies selling these products will say they work great. That’s the very very last person to trust in the conversation.
I graded papers for national high school exams for a few years (non-US) and there was a strict grading guide that you had to follow which took out any and all subjective grading out of the question.
The essay section grading guide was essentially a template that was a must to follow and any deviation would result in panalties.
You had about 30-45min to grade exams that could take 4-6 hours for students to complete and none of the questions were multiple choice they were all long form questions. With ~30 questions per exam, the time included saving the answers in the electronic grading pad and in the later years in the shitty VB application they provided. (Which I ended up hacking and having a spread sheet import function, this got me kicked out of the exam grading because I tampered with the application...).
We are already robograding papers just with mechanical Turks and in a process which is much less accurate which is why we use 2-3 graders per exam.
Until we find a better overal solution for evaluating student performance I don’t see anything wrong with robogradig exams and student work if anything it might give teachers some more free time to actually teach.
> Even human readers, who may have two minutes to read each essay, would not take the time to fact check those kind of details, he says. "But if the goal of the assessment is to test whether you are a good English writer, then the facts are secondary."
I would go a step further and say the goal of standardized tests is probably not to test if your a good English writer but rather to see if your good at that test. AI has tremendous ability to streamline the grading of standardized tests which are narrowly focused measure and I think that's fine if it comes with proper checks. As many people mention here I don't think AI will be able to objectively measure good general writing and I doubt we'd fully cede artistic evaluation to a computer as a society but I agree with being weary of this.
Standardized tests in general though seem to me like one of the greatest examples of a measure becoming a target and loosing a lot of its effectiveness (Goodhart's law). I can't help but be reminded of Paul Grahm's essay on nerds[1] by this article because the effective point of school from an evaluation standpoint is these tests. However now we've built a computer that grades these test's nearly as well as its human counter parts and its glaringly obvious that this evaluation is tremendously game-able. Which resonates with Paul's argument that: "The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose."
The presence of this quote in the article makes my day; doubly so given its source. It's a picturesque example of a statement that could conceivably get a 10/10 from a robo-grader based on the language and structure, but the thinking it represents is completely backwards.
I wonder if you could create a legitimate service that provides "Work from home as an Essay Grader."
They outsource essay grading, similar to what you are suggesting.
The positions are temporary/seasonal and I believe that the only qualification is a bachelor's degree.
1: https://github.com/edx/edx-ora2 2: https://github.com/edx/ease
... I believe there's also a tool for peer feedback.
Peer discussion and feedback are useful in things like college classes. Much less so with MOOCs.
> they will quickly learn they can fool the algorithm by using lots of big words, complex sentences, and some key phrases - that make some English teachers cringe.
Spot on! That's already the case with real teachers, with a computer it'll be hundreds of times easier (and horribly counter productive for the students' formation).
Back in the day, when I was a student, we already did a LOT of padding in our essays: writing pages upon pages (length mattered enormously!) of loooong sentences designed to -basically- make the discours look much more clever (and accurate) than it really was. I'm still puzzled why our teachers did not notice the obvious B.S. that it was! Seriously, I managed to pass some classes (university) with almost no real meat in the text. I just managed to write a coherent & logical argument, with a minimum of (vaguely remembered) facts, and that was enough to get a passing grade (but not a great grade of course). Ridiculous.
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Another fundamental problem is that even teachers don't have the same views upon what is a good essay. For the worst essays, I think they will agree: bad grammar, typos, no paragraphs, no logical structure, etc. But once you enter the average (or more) quality it becomes much more difficult to agree on which text is better! There is a LOT of subjectivity and personal taste, no matter what directives were given from the educational board, so your results would vary a lot depending on your current teacher.
Some teachers for instance are very narrow-minded, they expect students to "regurgitate" their lessons almost word by word, others appreciate a student's attempt to insight & originality / independence of thought. I've been in the french education system for a long time (including 6 years in 3 different universities), and it was shocking to see how much of a grade would depend on the teacher & of their perception of you (because that's also a factor, even if the teachers will swear it's not the case).
Even for technical subjects it's not obvious AT ALL that the teacher is right and rewarding the best answers. Now that I have many years of programming/projects management behind me, I see plainly the mistakes & B.S. that some teachers would give us. And I've had coworkers who were still part-time students explain some of the incredible misconceptions of their teachers, it was almost beyond belief! Those teachers really lived in another world, they had no clue.
Well, at least, if you are graded by a program, you know that you will only have to learn that program's "tastes/patterns", instead of facing the unknown of being graded by a random teacher (who may like your style or not). That's a small consolation.