Snyder Than You

agirlcalledchris:

“What if a computer could accurately grade student essays? It could change the way we test students (and the way they’re taught). And a new $100,000 competition is trying to spark auto-grading innovation.”

— The End Of Multiple Choice? The Quest To Create Accurate Robot Essay Graders (via fastcompany)

This is the worst fucking idea ever. A computer will never be able to grade essays, particularly literature essays, due to their subjective nature. Sometimes I hate all of the things technology chooses to be.

As an OCD grammar nazi student teacher who recently spent four or five days — probably 30-40 hours — grading 54 five-paragraph essays written by high school freshmen, I can only hope there is some way to make this a reality.

As a nearly middle-aged adult who has watched the world go from 27-volume print encyclopedias and large pieces of vinyl plastic holding 9 to 16 songs to billions of websites full of more  information than a single human can consume in several lifetimes and devices the size of my thumb holding hundreds of songs…

…let alone Google… let’s not even go into that holy-freaking-cow amazement….

Finally, as a strong proponent of high quality education for all, one who strongly despises standardized multiple-choice tests and More No Children Left Behind…

I not only know that this will be, at some point, possible, but I beg that it be so, hoping, of course, that somehow it doesn’t get screwed up like everything else in American education has.