A Computer, Not a Person, May Be Grading Your Essay

My favorite part of college counseling is guiding students through the essay process. No doubt my background as a high school English teacher, corporate communications director and magazine editor predispose me to like the writing aspect of the work. I am a huge fan of storytelling and secretly harbor a fantasy of getting my PhD with a dissertation about the effectiveness of sharing personal stories in corporate environments. But I digress. My blog post today is to express mixed emotions related to the controversy surrounding computer graded essays.

EdX (the MOOC partnership between MIT and Harvard) announced an essay grading software system that will instantly grade student papers, provide feedback, and allow the student to immediately rewrite for the chance to improve the grade. Brilliant academics are facing off on both sides of this issue.

There is certainly data that proves most people learn better with instant feedback. And I understand that it is unrealistic to provide personal  feedback if you are the professor of a MOOC that has 300,000 enrolled students. The financial model for keeping the cost of MOOC courses low (or free) means there must be an automated grading system and it's valuable to include writing rather than just multiple choice tests.

Since I read about 500 essays each applications season, I can personally attest to the fact that some high schools students are excellent writers, and others have a ways to go before their writing is college-level. Whichever end of the spectrum a student starts on, it saddens me to think that personal mentoring--heated discussions at the local coffee bar or in the professor's office--might be replaced by an artificially intelligent piece of software. My daughter's on-campus job as a writing tutor would be a relic of a bygone time.

What disturbed me most about the New York Times article was the ending (excerpted below).

"With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments...critics of the technology have tended to come... from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could. There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”

I stopped being a high school English teacher when my classes became too large for me to give meaningful feedback on writing assignments. I believed a student should write an essay each week, but I couldn't comment on 225 essays per week. If I couldn't do the job up to my standards, then I needed to find another job. The article writer implies that public college professors are all in the same situation I was in as a public high school English teacher. I hope not. While computerized essay grading may become acceptable for MOOC courses, I hope it will not become the standard used at colleges where students are in actual (rather than virtual) attendance. If it does, more students (and their parents) will question the value of attending college in person rather than via the internet.