Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break
By JOHN MARKOFF
Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times
EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated
software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and
short written answers.
A system developed by a joint venture between Harvard and M.I.T. uses
artificial intelligence to assess student papers and short written
answers, freeing instructors for other tasks.
Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times
EdX, a nonprofit enterprise
founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will
release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade
student essays and short written answers.
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: April 4, 2013
And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system
would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.
EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and
will make its automated software available free on the Web to any
institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial
intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing
professors for other tasks.
The new service will bring the educational consortium into a growing
conflict over the role of automation in education. Although automated
grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now
widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay
answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators and
has many critics.
Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted
that the 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. He said the technology would offer
distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where
students often wait days or weeks for grades.
“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal
said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant
feedback.”
But skeptics say the automated system is no match for live teachers. One
longtime critic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several
times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software
grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies that purport to show that the software compares well to human graders.
“My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did not
have any valid statistical test comparing the software directly to human
graders,” said Mr. Perelman, a retired director of writing and a
current researcher at M.I.T.
He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a
petition opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls
itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from luminaries like Noam Chomsky.
“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s
statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure
the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning,
adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument,
meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.”
But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and
universities. EdX offers free online classes from Harvard, M.I.T. and
the University of California, Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes
from Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12
universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course
completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year,
including adding international schools.
The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first
grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of
machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any
number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantaneously.
The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created
by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical rank. It will
also provide general feedback, like telling a student whether an answer
was on topic or not.
Dr. Agarwal said he believed that the software was nearing the capability of human grading.
“This is machine learning and there is a long way to go, but it’s good
enough and the upside is huge,” he said. “We found that the quality of
the grading is similar to the variation you find from instructor to
instructor.”
EdX is not the first to use automated assessment technology, which dates
to early mainframe computers in the 1960s. There is now a range of
companies offering commercial programs to grade written test answers,
and four states — Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia — are
using some form of the technology in secondary schools. A fifth,
Indiana, has experimented with it. In some cases the software is used as
a “second reader,” to check the reliability of the human graders.
But the growing influence of the EdX consortium to set standards is
likely to give the technology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announced
that it would work with EdX to develop a joint educational system that
will incorporate the automated assessment technology.
Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity,
recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open
online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment
systems because of the value of instant feedback.
“It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that
learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward
resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a
computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.
Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by
one of the Hewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two $100,000
prizes aimed at improving software that grades essays and short
answers. More than 150 teams entered each category. A winner of one of
the Hewlett contests, Vik Paruchuri, was hired by EdX to help design its
assessment software.
“One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said
Victor Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s
probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests. The challenge
is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and
they take a lot more time.”
Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio,
supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring
and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology — though imperfect — has a place in educational settings.
With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to
give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus,
he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the
nation’s best universities, where the level of pedagogy is much better
than at most schools.
“Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they
do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,”
Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is
actually going on in the real world.”
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