The article "Essay-grading software offers professors a break" written by John Markoff (2013) in The New York Times left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, I was excited by the prospect brought by artificial intelligence whose speed of development really seemed to go beyond my power of imagination. On the other hand, what had been magnified by the adoption of the instant-grading software and the main argument of its developers and advocators made me remain skeptical about its value and effect. For me, essay writing involves the highest level of linguistic complexities and deepest level of human thinking, and I have no idea how they could be put down objectively and reasonably by writing instructors in the scoring system with a form of letter grading or numerical ranking, which would then be used by the software to give students instant feedback and free instructors from manually grading essays, the biggest selling point of this software. In addition, people write to express their inner thoughts to the outside world, I highly doubt that they would stay as motivated as they had been before if they knew they would be communicating merely with a machine, which would be fooled into giving high marks by nonsense essays, not to mention whether it could ever "help kids learn how to think critically". Moreover, it is troubling to know that one of the major objectives of developing software like this is to deal with the increased demand of essay grading in online courses. In my opinion, rash implementation of automatic grading software would only make things worse, considering people's common concern about the quality of online courses compared with the off-line ones. At last, I do not see how this type of software could be used to address the inequality issue existing between "the real world" and those "prestigious institutions", and I find the logic of argument not acceptable. After all, could anyone ever say that essays written by students in less prestigious institutions do not deserve human appreciation?
Markoff, J.(2013). Essay-grading software offers professors a break. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
1 comment:
Hi Rong, you make several important points about this article and the software. I, much like you, feel like grading essays is probably one of the most entertaining tasks as a language instructor, because it gives us an opportunity to see how each student expresses his/ herself in the target language. On the other hand, nobody can lie about how time consuming grading such papers really is. I would also question the scoring system, since as you pointed out, it would not be motivating for students to know that this system is not capable of giving feedback for content/ remarks about critical thinking
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