Robo- Readers YUCK

When it comes to the growing population in the United States,  the Educational Testing Service has all of our testing grading handled.  Robo-Readers have been introduced to our society as grading machines.  They are able to grade 16,000 essays in the time span of one minute, and some may say has accuracy to a living human being.  With our rapidly increasing population it seems to be the only way to aid teachers with the more essay based learning that President Obama has proposed, but the main question is , is it accurate?

 According to a study made by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation the human graded essays and the computer graded essays had very similar grades. On the contrary, Les Perelman, a director of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the machines have many flaws.  She states that they set a very limited and rigid standard of what good writing is.  She also adds that they do not know what truth is.  The machine is not going to know if your facts are wrong. A student's fact could be 200 years off, and the machine would simply not notice or even care.

Like Les Perelman said these robo-readers are going to have a very specific guideline for what all writing should be like.  They are going to prefer longer essays, longer sentences, longer paragraphs, and larger words.  It would be simple for a student to make there paragraphs longer and use grandiose words just to achieve a better score.  The substance of an argument is quite irrelevant, the more "sophisticacated" a person sounds the better the essay will score.

Are these Robo-Readers going to replace our teachers? Will our younger generation eventually be solely learning from teachers? With most studies and therories completed, the answer seems to be no, but only time will tell...

Maps

In this map I notice how large the description/title is for the map. In comparison to the whole state of Carolina it really is the exact same size as the most southern point of Carolina.  I’m not sure exactly why the artist of the map decided to make it so large, but I was thinking it was maybe just to emphasize how important  Carolina really is and exactly how excited the new settlers are to live/ or discover this area.  I think that this map narrates the story of how English settlers were hoping that Carolina was going to be a valuable piece of land, which is similar to how English settlers felt about the rest of the undiscovered land.  In Babb’s writing she says “this map is particularly significant for its revelation of how colonial powers saw themselves in relation to the lands they sought to conquer.”   In this quote she isn’t exactly talking about this map, but I feel as if it is very relevant.  In this map there is a picture of a crown right in the middle of Carolina representing ownership and money.  Also like I stated earlier the description is quite large representing how valuable this land could be for the settlers.

http://www.libs.uga.edu/darchive/hargrett/maps/1676s6.jpg