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Frankly, I can't believe what I am reading. The idea that some "AI" grades essays automatically is idiotic and has nothing to do with education. Where is the place for discussions? Where is the place for ideas confrontation? Where is the place for writing style development? How this AI is supposed to grade things like repetitions (that can be either good rhetorical tool or a mistake, depending on context), etc?

Who the hell came out with such an idea. I would even hesitate to use "AI" for automatic spell checking as it is sufficient to give some character unusual name and it will be marked as error.

My guess is that soon or later people will learn how to game that AI. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some software that will generate essay that Utah "AI" likes.

My guess is that soon or later people will learn how to game that AI.

Already been done. http://lesperelman.com/writing-assessment-robo-grading/babel...

Here's a sample essay that is complete nonsense and got a perfect score on the GRE.

http://lesperelman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/6-6_ScoreI...

The final paragraph from that example is steaming gibberish that nobody could mistake for English:

"Calling has not, and undoubtedly never will be aggravating in the way we encounter mortification but delineate the reprimand that should be inclination. Nonetheless, armed with the knowledge that the analysis augurs stealth with propagandists, almost all of the utterances on my authorization journey. Since sanctions are performed at knowledge, a quantity of vocation can be more gaudily inspected. Knowledge will always be a part of society.Vocation is the most presumptuously perilous assassination of mankind."

Yet the robo-scoring acclaims it as:

* articulates a clear and insightful position on the issue in accordance with the assigned task * develops the position fully with compelling reasons and/or persuasive examples * sustains a well-focused, well-organized analysis, connecting ideas logically * conveys ideas fluently and precisely, using effective vocabulary and sentence variety * demonstrates superior facility with the conventions of standard written English (i.e., grammar, usage, and mechanics) but may have minor errors

Any teacher faced with the requirement to use such tools would be better placed instructing their class on civil disobedience.

The let me posit another idea...

There's 2 ways of finding out these artifacts of AI essay grading: pure luck, and being able to afford extensive test-prep (rich).

The luck one can't be accounted for. So I im lead to believe that the purpose of these essays and their AI grading is to find and escalate rich people.

> So I im lead to believe that the purpose of these essays and their AI grading is to find and escalate rich people.

Well, of course. How many poor people are allowed to decide what is good for children's education?

The standard US response is:

'There's a reason why they're poor. Better pull themselves up by the bootstraps."

Mixed alongside with poverty stricken neighborhoods are the primary funding, resulting in poor school systems. And those students obviously wont have the money or the access to get the test-prep needed to "succeed".

It's all too laid out to be accidental.

That reads like it was written by a GPT-2 bot.

A Markov chain would have been able to produce a text like that.

Wow - should have been marked for improper use of : though :-)

Professor Perelman had also previously demonstrated that this sort of scoring was going on when essays were scored by humans [1].

I suspect that, in addition to the scoring rules being written for speed and frugality, they were shaped by a poorly thought out attempt to make the scoring 'objective', and independent of the scorer's beliefs, attitudes and unconscious biases.

In one sense, this software (I will not call it 'AI') is an extension of all those bad ideas, only greatly amplified in a way that only software can.

In evolutionary biology, there is the concept of 'honest signalling'[2], a true and unfakable indicator, to a potential mate or predator, of an animal's fitness. That is what we are missing here.

[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/03/13/the-man-who-k...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

Anpther issue is one of copyright: obviously the student is the author. And we all know that the ML scoring subcontractor is keeping copies, with human ratings for later retraining purpouses.

At the time the student takes the test, he should be prompted with the informed choice asking him to grant either 1) no license to keep a copy for training purpouses 2) a non-exclusive license, and the website where he can get a copy of his own essay 3) a public domain license, again with the relevant domain linked so he can find his own and other's essays. 4) any of the above or other as a function of the resulting grade!

At the same time he should also specify his desire for or against attribution, again probably best as a function of the resulting grade. And under what moniker he wishes this contribution to exist.

These options to be filled out during exam time should have no default options (no opt-out), and preferably should be standardized by the community and lobbied for to be mandatorily enforced at state or federal level (forcing examinations to present the student with an informed choice)

A public dataset of legally obtained essays (without scores or names) would already be a very important first step to invite others to make actual performant ML grading systems.

I don't believe the current datasets in these "non-profit" organizations actually comply with copyright law, organizations who don't profit from the grading service towards the state, but do provide a stable ML job on the income from charging the people with financial means to test submissions, enabling a stealth class based society.

>> Who the hell came out with such an idea.

I'd guess this is a product of dwindling state finances and contempt for any form of real education. AI's are orders of magnitude cheaper than real teachers. They also don't form unions and wouldn't voice any opposition against changes in the curiculum.

They are also pretty useless, as you have pointed out. The consequences of this policy will be postponed until the students reach a certain age -- that'll be like 10-15 years in the future.

Until they end up at Uni or Work and find that they haven't developed the right skills.

I can't believe either, it's completely ridiculous. They're basically claiming that they've developed a general AI. It's like some part of population is living in different fantasy worlds and makes policy decisions accordingly.

Teachers often score by similarly sensible criteria.

Is the USA tenable going forward? Your cost of everything, value of nothing culture appears to be very destructive.

Honestly, no. It's not.

Granted I already have a very fatalistic view on my future already so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

It's progress built on top of an assumption of never-ending, unsustainable growth. Unfortunately for everyone else much of the world has been dragged into the rat race along with us.

I'd argue that the expectation of perpetual population growth is one of the big problems (the unsustainability of social security bottlenecking at the baby boomers being an obvious example).

There is a compelling case for immigration for that sake alone.

Not without change, but I'd argue further change is certain, and likely to be of large magnitude.

I do not know if it will be sustainable, but I doubt it will be static.

I agree with you wholeheartedly but I think there's a stronger argument to be made here: the algorithms being used "work" only on a correlation based on an ignorance of the scoring metric. If the students under test knew even sketchily how the system worked, e.g., points deducted if your average sentence word length > 7, points added if your word length stddev is greater than 2, and the students could meaningfully push their scores up by focusing on these proxies that don't _actually_ measure what a human would say is quality work - or even they can even get gibberish[0] rated highly - then the whole thing is a fraud. No one will stand for a grading system that only works by virtue of obscurity.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/education/robo-readers-us...

> My guess is that soon or later people will learn how to game that AI.

To be fair, the GP here is specifically describing that he gamed the AI via a copy-paste of a critique of the AI, his kid submitted it on their own accord, it was graded without comment, and then when the GP went into comment on the gaming of the AI, the teacher not only did not care that the AI was gamed, but expressed gratitude for the AI saving hours of work, still ignoring that the AI fundamentally made things worse, all at the expense of the entire point of being a teacher in the first place.

The issue, for the teacher, is that in 'the system' in which they collect a pay-check, the AI works flawlessly. The point, for the teacher, is not to educate children. It is to have assignments that children pass with some sort of distribution that can be sent in and calculated by some person in a beige suit, wide tie, and hair troubles. The difference is subtle at first, but when you get further along to the point where the GP is sitting, then the difference is comical.

The AI allows the teacher to increase their effiency in processing assignments, ones that never really mattered to the teacher in the first place. In valley-speak: the incentives are not aligned.

It is classic beancounter thinking in the worst way, the worst stereotype of a MBA trying to minimize cost beyond all reason cutting corners. Even when it saws at the branch they sit upon.

It is frankly a sign of a diseased culture to use it in any capacity except an exercise to improve AI.

When I was a child I was obsessed with the "grade level" function in Microsoft Word. It was a preference you could enable on spell check to tell you the "grade level" of your writing.

Every essay I wrote, I'd always force myself to reach the max "12.0" grade level. While writing I'd struggle over word choice, sentence structure, rearranging paragraphs, working on my tone etc, all in pursuit of the 12th grade way to phrase things. All my revisions were subject to the approval of the Grade Level checker.

Whenever I could I would check the grade levels of my friend's writing - usually by showing them a "neat feature" they could enable. Then, I'd smugly applaud myself for being the better writer whenever their grade level was below 12.0.

The Grade Level feature fascinated me and to try and master it, I found a book about Microsoft Word and looked through it in a bookstore. I was absolutely gobsmacked at how simple the formulas was. I had childishly been expecting something, like perhaps Utah educators imagine they have. I genuinely expected the method to be complex beyond my understanding.

Instead, Word used a variant of Flesch-Kincaid. There was a direct relationship between sentence length and grade score, and polysyllabic words and grade score. Meaning, the longer your sentences and words, the higher your grade score.

As soon as I got home from the bookstore I loaded a draft of something I had written. It was "pre-12.0" writing from me. I simply deleted all the periods but one and checked again. 12.0.

Automatic grading is a wonderful lure. It's nice to imagine that there's some objective writing quality easy to tap into. At the moment, I think we're far from that ability.

Personally, I feel the solution to insufficient teacher time is to use peer grading much more, and spot checks. Get kids to read and revise each other's works frequently, and teachers should aim to grade at least N papers per student where N is much less than the number of papers a student writes.

Revising is a really vital part of writing. Getting more chances to do revision, plus having to write something good enough to show your peers, plus having the risk of any paper count for your grade should compensate for incomplete teacher grading.

You just ruined my childhood Thanks.

The fact that you were literally still a child when this happened, but automated grading is being foisted on us by grown adults who are ostensibly professionals, says a lot about the situation.

All that grade-level gaming paid off, I reckon! This was a funny, informative personal account of it :)

Arguably, Hemingway's texts are well written. One of the sources of power of his prose is the use of simple words, and basic sentence structures. I bet Word would classify that as below 12th grade.

The point I am trying to make in agreement with the parent is: there are qualities that are very hard to score with algorithms. The difficulty of solving this problem equals if not exceeds that of automated translation, which still only works properly for specialized and limited domains, e.g. weather forecasts.

It's interesting that the tool (and system) is designed to aid people trying for the opposite result, i.e. for publicists and other authors striving to word their message to be as widely understood as possible.

Exactly I am doing this as part of some work I am doing with some content changes we are experimenting with on a major brands site.

> Personally, I feel the solution to insufficient teacher time is to use peer grading much more, and spot checks. Get kids to read and revise each other's works frequently, and teachers should aim to grade at least N papers per student where N is much less than the number of papers a student writes.

That's how it's done in creative writing courses. I've always found it infinitely more helpful than only having feedback from the instructor, even if the instructor's feedback was generally more helpful/useful than peer feedback.

Things like this story, Word's auto-grader, and Grammerly's style preferences are all surreal to me. We are asking a computer to validate prose meant for human consumption.

Not a reflection of physical reality like sensor data or even accounting information, but the method of communication explicitly invented for production and consumption by humans.

Of course feedback from humans is more valuable than feedback computers, it would be irrational/miraculous if anything was better at giving feedback than a human.

It is a shame it isn't self evident to instructors how poor of a solution this is, and how much better the results are when using critique by peers and instructors -- the classic way of doing things.

I went to high school in Utah, long before this automated scoring. It sounds awful but considering the quality of the education I received there perhaps not that bad after all.

My best Utah education anecdote - In the first day of British literature class the teacher came in and asked "Does anyone here know what A.D means?" someone said After Death - she said no. I figured this was my time to shine so I raised my eager hand and said "Anno Domini, in the year of the lord" - she said no.

Then she announced: "A.D means after the Deluge, and B.C means before Christ".

She also totally lied to me one time about whether she would be considering a particular textbook question as applying to Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.

Anyway I think that was one of the many classes I got an F in after stopped going and would walk past it every day on my way to play chess with my German teacher.

How is this relevant in a Lit class - presumably you hid the fact you where a Catholic / Anglican from her.

I don't know the relevance, I guess she just felt enthused about sharing some of her learning with us impressionable minds.

Actually I am and was an atheist, but I had recently been on an "I'm going to read the encyclopedia!" mission.

Wow this is pretty shocking. I can understand using automated systems for something like math problems, it makes sense. There’s (usually) one right answer. But essays? This should be banned.

Wait 'til you see a kid in tears because the math answer they submitted was supposed to equal zero, but the algorithms behind the scenes are so bad that the float math failed the equality check.

Note: This is not hyperbole, I have seen this exact scenario more than once.

There may be a place for a well-designed one, but if it exists, I've never seen it.

I know this is just my experience but I can confirm the automated math scoring system I was using in a large US university in 2012 had bugs where many times I would enter a complex solution with fractions and it would tell me I was wrong and the correct response was some other form of the same equivalent fraction... Talk about frustrating after pouring over a question for 10 minutes.

what was the allowed form of the fraction? a ratio of literal integers, or also including irrationals? variables? did the scoring system need to know formulas? as in (2/3)v =?= (2/3) omega*r ?

if only the last one is not required of the scoring system, then it's been available for ages, and its just a really poor implementation. That's not programming but plumbing data-pipes.

I remember to this day when I went round and round with a calculus teacher in high school who told me "sin(x) + 2" was incorrect. Then answer she wanted was "2 + sin(x)". I argued that addition was commutative, "2 + 3 = 3 + 2" and so forth. She wouldn't budge. She also said it was impossible to calculate the exact area under a curve, because you can't draw an infinite number of boxes under the curve.

Having an ignorant teacher is almost as bad as a flawed, black-box algorithm.

My gods, that is stupid.

Math is only not commutative in very rare areas. A specific area is concatenation of 2 strings, or 2 rotations of a rubiks cube.

> said it was impossible to calculate the exact area under a curve

And this is why a lot of people are against unions and similar protections for teachers. How do you get rid of someone who blatantly lies and informs falsely to students? How do you get rid of horrible teachers?

I have often solved many hard math problems with very unconventional solutions (eg geometrical proof for algebraic problems). Trust me, a piece of software is decades away from being able to accurately determine the future of children and massively impact their self esteem / trust in society.

"Fast, good, cheap"

The state chose fast and cheap. Well, its cheaper than more teachers.

Unconventional solutions can stump human teachers, also. One day on a chemistry test I was being stupid about how to define "stereoisomer". I knew what it was (two compounds that are mirror images of each other), I was just having trouble expressing it properly. Running out of time I put down "two molecules that are identical if and only if you permit rotation through the fourth dimension." This is extremely unconventional but it is correct--except not only did the teacher not understand it but I couldn't find any help in the mathematics department, either.

On one hand, I agree with you. I remember having to argue whether I showed my work or not by using imaginary numbers instead of standard formulas in high school physics.

But even with these examples, the path of appeal and rectification of mistakes is much easier with all humans involved. I fear soon people will side with the machine out of ignorance or to be justified in an incorrect stance.

The idea that we could be so poorly taught by broken automated systems, that we become incapable of detecting the system is broken seems like a possibility with AI that is much less likely in pure human systems of education (though not impossible).

It is important for the teacher to see where part of the class took the wrong turn, where the students' understanding ended. It is important to distinguish between careless errors, wrong memorizing of a formula and lack of understanding.

Having been forced to use an online math software for all my homework while at school, I vehemently disagree. It was so poor that it became a meme within my year group.

It would mark you as incorrect for using too many decimal places, even though it wouldn't tell you how many significant figures was required. I often remember it marking my answer as incorrect, even though it was identical to the answer they gave. Sometimes you'd have to show your working, but it couldn't handle brackets. Once I put the answer as "1+x=y" but they wanted the answer "y-1=x", and they marked it as incorrect.

I'm sure academic software design is leaps and bounds above what it was in the early 2000's, but to have a pupils futures hinge on what generally seems to be poorly tested code is dangerous.

That's just poor software. As long as the software and teachers or professors allow for going over answers and checking for correctness it should be alright.

That sounds like "My Math Lab" by Pearson. It is horrible like everyone talking in here states.

It's also a bundle with the book sold by unis, because the code 'allows' you to submit homework required for the class. So they're doing both resale prevention, AND horrible grading.

People I know who have to interact with it call it "My Meth Lab" - because you have to be high to like it.

> Turns out the instructions said the essay would be scored on verbal efficiency; getting the point across clearly with the fewest words. I started playing around and realized that the more words I added, the higher the score, whether they were relevant or grammatical or not.

Frankly, this does not change anything from my experience in school decades ago. The teachers always said that the length does not matter and we should not pad the papers. However students who wrote more pages got better scores every single time.

Historically on the written portion of the SAT length is substantially correlated to the final score.

I'm not sure that's an issue by itself. If the prompt is broad enough, a minimum length can be reasonable for essays.

It certainly could be a problem if the prompt was too narrow, or time constraints, or some other factor.

Do you think the correlation by itself indicates something negative/inefficient I'm missing?

I think that the required length should be bounded on both sizes and penalised if the paper is either too short or too long.

Is it possible that the students who wrote shorter papers were in fact presenting incomplete arguments and/or thoughts? Writing clearly and concisely is extremely difficult.

It is possible but all of them? Also by “short” I usually mean four pages which was the usual recommendation for a paper length. To have a good grade one would need to write ten. The subject was usually something vapid so most of that must have been drivel.

You have automated systems that rate essays without any human actually reading them?

Kids, forget everything you know because crime does indeed pay off. Best grades will be reserved for those that try to cheat this system however it is implemented. Botting your essays is the way to go in the 21st century.

Given that the stack ranking at your future job will also be done by an "AI" (probably developed by the same company that graded you tests) this is a very useful skill to have.

Good point, I better teach my kid this skill so she can go on to a job programming one of these "AIs"

idiocracy will happen not because people get any stupider, but because the bots reward the stupid ones first.

Maybe Idiocracy was right about the whole "It's got electrolytes!" meme, except swap out electrolytes for neural networks.

Now I need a video of Luke Wilson saying "What are neural networks? Do you even know?"

>Turns out the instructions said the essay would be scored on verbal efficiency; getting the point across clearly with the fewest words. I started playing around and realized that the more words I added, the higher the score

Apart from the fact that your story is straight up frightening, isn't this part completely backwards, too? I mean, clearly using more words to convey the same message is /less/ efficient, not more so?

Yes. Exactly. Before I figured out how to game the program, my son and wife were editing shorter. That’s what the instructions said to do. And, that’s also a major strategy for decent writing: brainstorm a lot, then edit down to the good parts. What this means is the software’s scoring is an anti-incentive to good writing. Used as a teaching aid, it’s actually doing pure damage, not good. Not only can it not score reliably, nor provide meaningful feedback, it’s actually actively teaching a very wrong way to write. But it is cheaper than humans, and it does give immediate feedback, so there’s that.

This is a problem I have with a lot of human behavior. Instead of admitting you don’t have the resources to do something or aren’t willing to prioritize it, people come up with a bad version that’s not worth doing. Lots of things are worth doing poorly, but many of them I believe you just need to admit are not worth it unless a certain level of performance is met.

What’s even cheaper than AI? Tell the students to write some pages, have the teacher glance at the number of pages written, give full credit if the mark was met, and throw the papers out without reading them. It sounds like it would be similarly effective and less aggravating. Unfortunately, this would require humility on the part of the educators.

Think from a positive angle, students today are learning useful life skills to game computer systems, which they will have to deal with when they grow up.

edit: ...just like how previous generations have to learn how to game social systems.

Except the algorithm being gamed can change suddenly, drastically and without the gamer's knowledge.

When such changes occur, the gamer will be docked until they can reverse-engineer the new algorithm. There's also the risk that all their previous inputs "gaming" the system might be reconsumed to terrible results as well, effectively rewriting their historical performance disasterously.

As always, those with the social standing and power to have insider knowledge or guidance will be in the best position to profit off such systems.

Ho ho. Wait. You mean you were able to submit multiple versions of the essay? So that anyone can basically game the test, by submitting multiple essays until they get the best score they can wring out of it?

That is just mad.

It's be easier and equally fair to just grade student's essays by rolling a pair of dice.

It's arguably more fair. At least purely random scoring doesn't incentivize cheating.

wait, you get the score in real time? Like some kind of objective function you can train a machine to maximise on?

Heh heh. I like the way you think. Hackers of Utah unite!

This needs to just be outright banned

I can't even comprehend how someone can use automation for a task like this... It completely goes against human nature. In a world where all jobs have been automated teachers would be the last ones to go before humanity is completely obsolete.

Do you just get to keep submitting the essay to see what score it will get before you turn it in? That sounds like a bigger problem than any of the particulars about how the grading is done.

In this case, there was a limit to the number of times the essay could be submitted, and there was a required score that needed to be obtained within that limit, otherwise the grade would go down. The limit was something like 20 tries, and when I got there they’d already used maybe 14 of them.

I could perhaps see value in having unlimited tries, as a teaching aid, if the result wasn’t being used for grading. That would at least leave room for curiosity and exploration. And, more importantly, I could see value if the software wasn’t essentially a scam that fundamentally is not able do what is advertised. If the software really could grade essays reliably, and provide meaningful suggestions for improvement, then maybe it could be used to help educate students, in conjunction with the teacher’s guidance. But the software does not grade reliably, and it absolutely does not offer meaningful constructive feedback, and the teachers were using it to avoid reading essays, not to supplement their own expertise.

One of the several amusing ironies here is how the software company has convinced the state and teachers to willingly replace themselves with bots, despite obvious evidence that the humans can do the job better.

I can see how giving students multiple tries would be a great teaching aid if we had human-level AI. With what we have now, I'd bet it's just training them to produce essays that hit the flaws in the AI as hard as possible to produce unreadable garbage with high scores. 20 tries per essay adds up to a lot across 12 years of schooling.

Teachers are extremely overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. I'm not surprised that it was easy to convince them to offload the difficult and time-consuming work of manually grading essays. This also means they don't have to deal with complaints about unfair grading. A machine did it and it's out of their hands.

The instant feedback mechanism is just begging for someone to turn it into a GAN by writing the other half. I would absolutely love to hear that some particularly clever high school student was able to train an ML algorithm to consistently fool the grading algorithm, thus instantly rendering all of their efforts worthless and dragging the administrators through the mud at the same time.

That really sounds like Utah, they have lots of students (due to LDS influences) with a conservative government (ditto), so the pupil/teacher ratio is insane. I can guess the teacher really doesn’t have any other choice.