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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

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 will be gamed and manipulated by everyone involved. Almost nobody involved is incentivized to accurately measure student’s writing ability.

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I think machines could be valuable in giving feedback on writing, like that grammarly.com.

A lot of what students write is actually garbage from that point of view. Even if they happen to have a good basic idea about what they want to say, the point of essay writing is to master the mechanics of expression so that you get the idea across effectively.

Whether the student has a brilliant idea isn't even so important, and it wouldn't even be fair; imagine if high school computer science expected students to turn in a best-selling app for a term project. Not everyone can come up with something brilliant to say; and even relatively mundane lines of reasoning can be given a good treatment in writing to develop the skill.

I remember when I had essays graded in school, a lot of the comments were low-grade fluff like "run on sentence", "wrong word", "faulty parallelism", "missing colon before 'for example'" and such points having nothing to do with the content being original, well-considered and well-argued. That sort of thing might as well be done by machine, at least as a preprocessing step to improve a student's rough draft.

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 techniques because the way the test is set permits this.

You see the same thing here, in English you can get away with not teaching quality writing if you teach techniques to score well.

I feel like the mistake is assuming that essay writing is about the content. It's just a thing to give the student something barely non-trivial to write about.

When your essays are graded they're marked down for mechanical and wording problems. There's really no point in trying or grade 'good ideas' on a subject piece you had maybe 10 minutes to skim.

a subject piece you had maybe 10 minutes to skim

That's a travesty, and you know it because when the kids are in college and they have as much time as they like to write their assignments they all use the wrong words and then misapply them.

If I have 3 left shoes colored blue green and red, and you have 2 right shoes colored black and white, how many pairs can we make if our lefts and rights are put together?

Hint: together does not mean plus.

There is value in the ability to produce correct English 'off the cuff'. You could argue essays are the best way to get students to produce off the cuff written text. Hence, it makes some sense to ask students for essays, and then judge those essays only for form.

However, it is rather important that students know their essays are not judged as essays, but only judged on the content. Otherwise you teach students that form trumps content in essays.

When judging an essay as an essay correct English barely matters. What matters is how convincing you are, and how interesting of a read the essay is. This is a great skill to have, and testing it also makes sense. Really though, we should separate these two forms of testing.

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