[Vision2020] Ready For Prime Time?

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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April 4, 2013
Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break By JOHN
MARKOFF<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_markoff/index.html>

Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and
getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send”
button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay
scored by a software program.

And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system
would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.

EdX <https://www.edx.org/>, the nonprofit enterprise founded by
Harvard<http://www.harvard.edu/>and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology <http://www.mit.edu/> to offer courses on the
Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated
software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it.
The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short
written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

The new service will bring the educational consortium into a growing
conflict over the role of automation in education. Although automated
grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now
widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay
answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators and has
many critics.

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted
that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool,
enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve
the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct
advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait
days or weeks for grades.

“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal
said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant
feedback.”

But skeptics say the automated system is no match for live teachers. One
longtime critic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times
for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading
programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of
studies<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/science/Critique_of_Shermis.pdf>that
purport to show that the software compares well to human graders.

“My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did not have
any valid statistical test comparing the software directly to human
graders,” said Mr. Perelman, a retired director of writing and a current
researcher at M.I.T.

He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a
petition opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls
itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in
High-Stakes Assessment <http://humanreaders.org/petition/>, has collected
nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from luminaries like Noam Chomsky.

“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s
statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the
essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning,
adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument,
meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.”

But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and
universities. EdX offers free online classes from Harvard, M.I.T. and the
University of California, Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes from
Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12 universities
participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course completion and has
said that it plans to continue to expand next year, including adding
international schools.

The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade
100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of
machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any number
of essays or answers automatically and almost instantaneously.

The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by
the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical rank. It will also
provide general feedback, like telling a student whether an answer was on
topic or not.

Dr. Agarwal said he believed that the software was nearing the capability
of human grading.

“This is machine learning and there is a long way to go, but it’s good
enough and the upside is huge,” he said. “We found that the quality of the
grading is similar to the variation you find from instructor to
instructor.”

EdX is not the first to use automated assessment technology, which dates to
early mainframe computers in the 1960s. There is now a range of companies
offering commercial programs to grade written test answers, and four states
— Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia — are using some form of
the technology in secondary schools. A fifth, Indiana, has experimented
with it. In some cases the software is used as a “second reader,” to check
the reliability of the human graders.

But the growing influence of the EdX consortium to set standards is likely
to give the technology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announced that it
would work with EdX to develop a joint educational system that will
incorporate the automated assessment technology.

Two start-ups, Coursera <https://www.coursera.org/> and
Udacity<https://www.udacity.com/>,
recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online
courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems
because of the value of instant feedback.

“It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that
learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward
resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a
computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by one
of the Hewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two $100,000 prizes
aimed at improving software that grades essays and short answers. More than
150 teams entered each category. A winner of one of the Hewlett contests,
Vik Paruchuri, was hired by EdX to help design its assessment software.

“One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said
Victor Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably
impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests. The challenge is that
this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and they take a
lot more time.”

Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised
the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a
paper<http://www.scribd.com/doc/91191010/Mark-d-Shermis-2012-contrasting-State-Of-The-Art-Automated-Scoring-of-Essays-Analysis>about
the experiment. In his view, the technology — though imperfect — has
a place in educational settings.

With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give
students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he
noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best
universities, where the level of pedagogy is much better than at most
schools.

“Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do
a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr.
Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually
going on in the real world.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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