The Contemplative Cynic Sends This In: "The Algorithm Didn’t Like My Essay."

Skip Sterling
for NYTimes.

As a professor and a parent, I have long dreamed of finding a software program that helps every student learn to write well. It would serve as a kind of tireless instructor, flagging grammatical, punctuation or word-use problems, but also showing the way to greater concision and clarity.

Now, unexpectedly, the desire to make the grading of tests less labor-intensive may be moving my dream closer to reality.

The standardized tests administered by the states at the end of the school year typically have an essay-writing component, requiring the hiring of humans to grade them one by one. This spring, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition to see how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders. The winners were announced last month — and the predictive algorithms were eerily accurate.

FULL ARTICLE.