![]() The New York Times reports that four US states (Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia) now use automated essay grading systems in secondary schools and in some situations the software is used as a backup which provides a check on the human assessors.Īutomated essay grading relies upon the system being trained with a set of example essays that have been hand-scored. MOOCs were initially brought to us by prestigious American universities – offering the same content that students paid for, to anyone for free.Īustralian universities soon jumped on board and homegrown MOOC platforms quickly followed.Īustralian schools and universities have been using automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests for many years.īut edX has moved one step further using artificial intelligence technology to grade essays – a controversial step given this approach is yet to be accepted.ĮdX’s president, Anant Agarwal told the New York Times earlier this month that “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.” Agarwal said the use of artificial intelligence technologies to grade essays had “distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.” Robot gradersĪutomated grading systems that assess written test answers have been around since the 1960s when the first mainframe computers were introduced. The hype surrounding MOOCs reached fever pitch last year. A sketch of the brief history of automated writing-evaluation research and its future directions might lend some credence to this argument.EdX, a non-profit MOOC provider founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, introduced automated essay grading capability in a software upgrade earlier this year.īut should automated grading systems be used for essays? And how good are these systems anyway? The MOOC phenomena It will also help us develop more effective technologies, such as search engines and question-answering systems, for providing universal access to electronic information. It will help us develop more effective instructional materials for improving reading, writing, and other human communication abilities. Using computers to increase our understanding of the textual features and cognitive skills involved in creating and comprehending written text will have clear benefits. ![]() Nevertheless, automated writing-evaluation systems might provide precisely the platforms we need to elucidate many of the features that characterize good and bad writing, and many of the linguistic, cognitive, and other skills that underlie the human capacity for both reading and writing. So it comes as no surprise that attempts to devise computer programs that evaluate writing are often met with resounding skepticism. Furthermore, we hold our ability to express ideas in writing as a pinnacle of this uniquely human language facility-it defies formulaic or algorithmic specification. The ability to communicate in natural language has long been considered a defining characteristic of human intelligence. Pedagogical and future assignment suggestions are then outlined, utilizing a multicultural-lens and acknowledging the possibility of certain assessments disadvantaging non-native English speakers within an English-based MOOC system. ![]() Survey responses also revealed that students often utilized online translators, though analyses showed that this did not detrimentally affect essay grades. Additionally, our results suggest that the use of an AES system may disadvantage non-native English speakers, with agreement between instructor and AES scoring being significantly lower for non-native English speakers. Native English speakers performed better on the assignment overall, across both automated-and human-graders. We report on the findings from a linguistically-diverse pharmacy MOOC, taught by a native English speaker, which utilized an automated essay scoring (AES) assignment to engage students in the application of course content. Drawing from the literature on open-course models and linguistic gatekeeping in education, we position freeform assessment in MOOCs as both challenging and valuable, with an emphasis on current practices and student resources. This paper utilizes a case-study design to discuss global aspects of massive open online course (MOOC) assessment.
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