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...
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