What will they think of next?
Xerox has a new machine that can grade tests and even essays.
No human judgment necessary. The mechanization of the classroom moves forward.
Will teachers understand what their students know and can do when they no longer read their papers?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know what took them so long — they long ago invented a machine that writes papers.
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We have enough problems with xerox machines already. I suggest xerox first produce a machine that doesn’t jam or need service every day. First elimate the wasted time spent by every teacher trying to unjam todays machines
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Can I get an amen?
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Dienne, you sound like the old-timer who had problems with understanding the workings of a microwave.
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Or maybe it’s just that Xerox makes a crappy product. We have a 15-month-old Xerox at our office and service was out every single week (if not multiple times per week) for the first 12 of those months. I’m hardly an “old timer”, but honestly one of those old purple hand-crank mimeograph machines would have been better.
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We continue moving forward! Much to the dismay of many old timers who hate change, technology is giving me the tool I need to maximize my effectiveness as a teacher. Tests are complimentary to what I know about my students. Get the grunt work (tests) out of the way and let’s get along with the business of learning.
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We’re all old-timers eventually.
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Thank you FLERP!
By the way dickvelner, I love change and technology. But, technology has its proper place and use in all aspect of life. The “change” of human capital replaced by technology to advance corporate capital can be very dangerous for your career, especially as we all get to be “old-timers eventually”.
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Mr. Velner, sir–old-timers love tech! Look at my distinguished colleague Prof. Mark Naison of Fordham U, also known as Notorious Phd, a professorial rapper whose creatively into all kinds of tech. I watched the Xerox clip twice, found it very interesting but not informative enough, need more detail. How will the machine grade essays, by grammatical forms like compound sentences, simple sentences, complex sentences, rhetorical linkages, etc.? Math is a different kind of language from alphabetic discourse. Xerox and the teachers in the clip do not engage a prime problem of mass education, also—that our classes are too large, and that research demonstrates the value of small classes esp in k-3 and esp among less affluent communities, and that parents continually list smaller classes as a key need for their kids’ schools. Perhaps this new Xerox tool will ease the work of teachers in underfunded pub schls where classes have always been too large. Affluent parents who send their own kids to expensive pvt schls pay 20-45K/yr/child for small classes. Perhaps this benefit can be extended to all of America’s children if the $4.75TRILLION which XEROX and other corps. in the US now have in the bank were finally taxed for public needs and social services.
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I didn’t think you taught anymore. You just lecture…your specialty. Dick loves Dick.
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Yep, I’m just an old fart Spanish teacher who hasn’t come into the 21st century as I don’t have a cell phone. Just sat out on the front porch last night enjoying a brewski and the birds, bees, trees clouds, wind etc. . . .
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Jealous. About the cell phone and the porch. I do have beer, at least, and a nearly full bottle of Old Grandad.
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They’re just trying to make up for letting the mouse and icons slip through their fingers.
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Funny, will. And the graphical user interface and Ethernet and the Postscript language. They basically owned the whole PC revolution and didn’t think it worth anything. An oldie but goodie, that story.
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They may have owned it, but they did not take into account that people would be using it. It was Jobs that saw the users were spending tir
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How much testing has been done with this? Does it break down. Does it mess up with the analysis. I can see it working on math problems but not writing in many cases. Machines want to see, as do many humans, writing styles in the manner that they want them scripted. I used to run into this problem all the time as they wanted me to do the regular style and mine was not that. I still use my style. Who says I should not and as a matter of fact the best writers style vary considerably, creativity. Do you really want to read boring all the same style writing? Now whether or not you can spell and have some construct is another thing. I don’t believe they can really do what they say consistently. Also, the human element of the teacher who personally knows this student is wiped out completely. No creativity in fact the exact opposite it creates clones as the machine is a digital object without thought for real.
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“providing notes on spelling and grammar like a word processor would.”
Rest easy, for now. No semi-literate person actually consults, much less defers to, the grammatical advice of word processing software. It’s just not good enough. Yet.
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Absolutely! Funny story here: G & T expert ran a workshop. It said, on her promo sheet, “Jane Doe’s presentation will illicit a variety of informative responses from her audience!”
At the workshop, I showed it to Jane, telling her, “What a great word for getting people here!” She laughed and said, “My secretary must’ve used SpellCheck!” Of course, should have said “elicit,” but the reader would have to understand homophones and the definitions of those given–always–by SpellCheck.
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R2D2 rules! Guess we should all start preparing for our next careers … time to reread Farenheit 451
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Next chancellor is C3PO and the Secretary of Education is HAL 9000!
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Hello HAL, do you read me?
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Yes, I agree. Marking papers is time consuming. When I mark a test, it’s more than just an X or check, it’s looking at exactly what went wrong. In math for instance, the child may have the correct strategy, but made a careless computation. Does the teacher see the child understood the process even if the final answer is wrong using this method? If not, then the teacher may wind up re-teaching the whole strategy instead of just reviewing the particular computational skill.
And yes, essay may have many spelling errors, but if the child still can write a good response using supporting details, do I give the whole essay a failing grade or, do I separate the mechanics from the content and grade each skill accordingly?
Grading papers is more than just seeing if a student passed, it’s also getting to know the student a bit better. Yes, their are assessments that I wouldn’t mind be graded by a machine, but can that same machine understand the nuance of a child writing about the death of a family member. Can it understand the voice or the use descriptive images?
But the real question is, “Isn’t writing supposed to be a process?” My students write many drafts using editing and revision before handing in the final paper. It may not be the best final piece, but it’s better than the original draft. If the standard is for the child to revise and edit, why would I make a machine edit? Sound like the new “red pen” method to me.
I saw the Youtube video Xerox put out, and all I see is test prep worksheets.
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Thank you Schoolgal. Contrary to much that I read on Diane’s blog, I am a mover for change. Machines are great for complimenting what I do in the classroom. As a math teacher I can use technology to different ends. It is the progress of the student I am looking for and I will be the Judge.
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And you should be the judge. But soon the privateers will use technology to take that right away from you. We are already being judged by VAM, and that is based on a machine scoring a test we cannot even look at. We already have a record of Pearson machines scoring incorrectly in conjunction with a statistical model that is junk science. Yet these factors will determine if you have a job the following year. We also don’t know if these machines are storing information about both the teacher and student.
Everyone here is a mover for change. But we first have major problems to fix….like overcrowding. And you know this Xerox machine will not enhance or change the social and economic challenges our students face each and every day. Is the cost of putting this Xerox machine in your school worth the axing of something else??? Teachers, counselors, The Arts for instance??? Or is having this machine grade papers worth having an additional 15-20 students in your class??
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“But soon the privateers will use technology to take that right away from you”
If there are any ways to control the incursion of technology into education, then somebody better get on that quick, because it very well may be that the technology improvements we’ve seen in the last 5, 10, 20 years will look like a flatline compared to what’s up ahead, and “privateers” are probably not going to fade into nonexistence. Technology change has a way of happening from moment to moment, without any regard for whether we can see the full arc of the trend.
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No you’re not the judge..SBAC or PARCC and the Gates USDOE are the judges. Catch up Dick!
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The slick piece of marketing collateral that Xerox produced for this product features, most prominently, a picture of a smiling teacher bent over to help a smiling student. But the promise of the product is precisely the opposite–that teacher feedback will be eliminated (automated).
Clearly, it’s a fairly simple matter to create technologies that correct multiple-choice and other so-called “objective” tests. More troubling is the promise that the technology will score “constructed response” items (in non-EduSpeak, writing). Let’s be clear about this. There is no existing system that can read, as that term is understood when it is predicated of a human being. What creators of such software can do is to correlate various features of pieces of writing that can easily be recognized by software to outcomes assigned those pieces of writing by human teachers. So, one might come up with some formula involving use in the piece of writing of terms from the writing prompt, average sentence length, average word length, number of spelling errors, number of distinct words used, frequency of words used, etc., that yields a score that is highly correlated with scores given by human readers/graders using a rubric. At a whole other level of sophistication, one might create a system that has a parser and that does rudimentary checking of grammar and punctuation. Some of that is easy–e.g., does each sentence begin with a capital letter? Some of it is rather more difficult (a system that correctly identifies all and only those groups of words that are sentence fragments would have to be a complete model of grammatical patterns for well-formed sentences in English). Who knows whether the Xerox system is that sophisticated. One cannot tell whether it is from the marketing literature, which is a concatenation of glittering vagaries. But even if one had a perfect system of this kind that almost perfectly correlated with scoring by human readers, it would still be the case that NO ONE was actually reading the student’s writing and attending to what he or she has to say and how it is said. The whole point of the enterprise of teaching kids how to write is for them to master a form of COMMUNICATION BETWEEN PERSONS, and one cannot eliminate the person who is the audience of the communication and have an authentic interchange.
Since these writing graders first started appearing, I have read an enormous amount of hogwash about them from people who don’t understand that we don’t yet have artificial intelligences that can read. Instead, we have automated systems for doing various tasks that stand in lieu of anyone doing any reading.
There’s another problem. The way these systems work is by looking for regularities common to pieces of writing. But one of the hallmarks of exceptional writing is that it violates expectations. For example, contemporary professional journalists often make use of sentence fragments for emphasis. Like this one, for example. But these automated systems would flag such deviations from some horrific norm. Excellent writing violates norms.
It’s amusing to imagine Blake or Rumi writing an answer to one of these standardized test prompts and then having that answer be graded by some automated system.
And, I would love to have a chance to write pieces for one of these automated graders. It wouldn’t take me long, at all, to learn how to game them, to produce pieces that score perfectly but that are absolute nonsense, ones filled with sentences like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” What I would demonstrate by producing such pieces is that one can master the forms (the godawful five-paragraph theme, for example) and have no ability to write anything worth reading.
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Mr. Veiner, you need to learn to speak to others with some degree of civility. I am no stranger to technology. I have written computer science textbooks. But I find these so-called “grading systems” laughable. The purveyors of them are engaged in a short of carnival shell game, promising one thing and delivering another. If they told people what their systems actually do, few would be interested in using them for anything other than checking bubbles.
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How about using the systems to drive a car?
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Those driverless car systems show enormous promise. The creators of Google’s driverless car are not making false claims about it. They are not intimating, for example, that it will solve any existential crises you might be experiencing in your life. They are saying that it will get you to your destination safely and with greater fuel efficiency. Writing is a meaningful interchange between sentient entities. That’s its whole point. One day, probably before long, we will, I suspect, share this planet with sentient, artificial intelligences, ones that can do things like read and grade writing appropriately. That day has not arrived.
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I agree that writing like Coleridge is more difficult than driving the 110 in LA during rush hour. My students do not generally write like Coleridge, especially in the first draft.
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Big Brother is not only watching you, he is also copying, storing, and tracking your stats.
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I do remember watching a show on an organization that refurbished and resold copy machines. One of the biggest jobs they did was making sure to remove the memory that contains copies of all the documents that have been copied on that machine. I remember in particular one that came from a police department that contained a substantial amount of highly confidential information.
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So when the powers that appear to be purchasing our public education system complete the transaction and teachers become obsolete, who will a student with a creative idea turn to in order to follow through with their amazing idea? A xerox machine? If this “merger” happens to the extent that it appears, why bother with an education? I suppose my naivity led me to believe k12 and higher education led us to become creative and intelligent individuals; in walks common core. First, I don’t have a problem with improving standards and increasing expectations with appropriate validation, but at the moment it appears that the true common core is the common core that is being created inside our children in what appears to be an attempt to make everyone the same. Why does everyone need a college education. What about Career and Technicsl Trades? Underwater welders make great money, yet many CTE programs are an after thought. I hope I am wrong and common core ends up helping teachers help students to become amazing individuals. As well, I hope high stakes testing…. well I just can’t find the words!
DrBOnline
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Brought to you by the fools who think putting a number on things is progress.
The real purpose of “grading papers” is feedback. When the feedback consists of a single alphabetic character or a two digit number, it is almost worthless for learning purposes. Grades are very, very, very gross forms of feedback.
But you would need some time teaching to follow the logic so……
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So when the powers that appear to be purchasing our public education system complete the transaction and teachers become obsolete, who will a student with a creative idea turn to in order to follow through with their amazing idea? A xerox machine? If this “merger” happens to the extent that it appears, why bother with an education? I suppose my naivity led me to believe k12 and higher education led us to become creative and intelligent individuals; in walks common core. First, I don’t have a problem with improving standards and increasing expectations with appropriate validation, but at the moment it appears that the true common core is the common core that is being created inside our children in what appears to be an attempt to make everyone the same. Why does everyone need a college education. What about Career and Technicsl Trades? Underwater welders make great money, yet many CTE programs are an after thought. I hope I am wrong and common core ends up helping teachers help students to become amazing individuals. As well, I hope high stakes testing…. well I just can’t find the words!
DrBOnline
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Thank you all. Readingexchange, RDS, FLERP and all others who I put in the category of “Cry Babies”. You can cry all you want about what is coming in the way of change. You do not like those who challenge your thinking. You think you are right because you have some sense of credential.. Please wake up because the future will bury you if your closed minded thinking limits your effectiveness.
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Who’s whining now?
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Linda and those posting just below: do you ever get the feeling that somebody never learned—and has never come to understand—what a “persuasive essay” was and is?
😦
On the other hand, if someone is inept at writing persuasively and has learned through bitter experience to expect to never persuade anyone of anything, turning over all judgment to machines makes perfect sense.
Is there another way to lead people to adopt one’s POV? You can find examples of that on this blog. Plus the following advice—by an admittedly imperfect carbon-based life form—might be relevant here: “You don’t lead by hitting people over the head—that’s assault, not leadership” [Dwight G. Eisenhower].
Y’all keep posting. I’ll keep reading.
🙂
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“You don’t lead by hitting people over the head—that’s assault, not leadership” [Dwight G. Eisenhower].
Love the quote KTA….someone needs to tell Arne, Barack, Gates and the rest of the edufrauds.
My CT amigo, Alan, told me about a great bumper sticker. It read:
“Well, at least we are winning the war against education.”
I wish the FERPA changes Arne made (districts giving student data and personally identifiable information to third party vendors without parental permission) would break into the mainstream media and add to the growing list of scandals.
If only ALL parents knew about that invasion. Things could get really ugly.
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Linda: getting a 50% off coupon for something you really want to buy—Great! Coining a new, pointedly accurate description of the edubullies, to wit, “edufrauds”—Priceless!
Will the HAL 9000 essay grader rate your last comment “exceptionally creative,” 99th percentile, or will you fall into the 1st percentile for using unacceptable language not found in its cagebusting most excellently innovative artificial memory banks?
Cheer up, though, I hear they are not using machine grading at Harpeth Hall, Sidwell Friends, U of Chicago Lab Schools, and Waldorf School of the Peninsula.
Any chance you might get into the 8:1 teacher-student ratio at Harpeth Hall?
I’m pulling for ya…
Need a achievement-gap busting Krazy letter of rec?
🙂
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Dick, that’s not fair. First, I love having my thinking challenged. When there’s no one willing to do it, I do it myself. Second, I have no credentials. Third, I am largely ineffective. But make no mistake, the future will bury you, too.
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We all become worm food in the end.
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I don’t understand how wanting to actually read our students’ writing so that we can give constructive feedback and learn more about our students is under “Cry Babies.” We use a computer writing system in our district, and we use it in class, but I also read each student’s essays. I got into teaching to get to know the students–not just to rank and sort them.
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You’re a teacher? Do you talk this way to your students? Is this the level of respect you encourage in your classrooms? Could you please tell us where you teach so we can all warn our friends and family about you? Although, come to think of it, while I hope you don’t deal with young children, older students could benefit from having a teacher like you. There are a growing number of, um, difficult people in this world and they may as well learn to deal with the likes of you sooner or later.
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Whaaaa!!!!!!! Real teachers should be seen and not heard. (The word according to the Dicks of this world)
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The machine would just use formulas to calculate the writing. Imagine if you knew one of the criteria was key word usage. All this would do is increase the amount of bullsh$t in their papers instead of learning to writing succinctly.
Let me ask you…would you be comfortable with a machine grading your college acceptance essay?
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That would be “whom I put,” Mr. Velner. Objective case.
One of my favorite books, by the way, is Virginia Postal’s The Future and Its Enemies. It’s amusing that you would make the assumption that those who think these computer grading systems nothing but charlatanism would necessarily be luddites. That’s a nonsequitur. You teach math. I assume that you know what that means.
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Machines can’t measure your heart and soul.
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It appears there is a validation option, similar to the grading feature in many Learning Management Systems. This will most likely allow for subjective grading and interpretation.
(http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-05/new-software-teaches-photocopiers-grade-papers)
As a musician, I prefer an individual’s evaluation over that of a machine that is based soley on timing and exact pitch. TIming and pitch,etc., are part of an individual musicians representation of a song. Music and writing are both art forms that should be evaluated subjectively with the caveat that certain components can be graded objectively. It is called interpretation and technology cannot analyze the feelings my music, poem, or essay elicit from an individual.
I do not see the posts of these individuals as those of cry babies and I find it unfortunate that this blog went in the direction of “name calling”. Having spent ~20 years teaching higher education faculty to develop and deliver web-based courses and programs, I feel confident I will not get buried by the future. I, along with many of these individuals are intelligent enough to realize the importance of subjective interpretation as well as the capabilities and limitations of new technologies of this nature.
DrBOnline
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I look at Xerox’s announcement as an attempt to get a share of the huge profits computer products hope to reap in educational testing. They can probably carve out a niche. Since I assume that teachers still have access to the hard copies of tests, teachers have flexibility in how to use the information. I am with Robert Shepherd when it comes to grading essays and while I would like the ease of grading problem sets or cloze type exercises, I still want to see the student’s thinking process. As a quick snapshot, I think it could be quite useful. When I taught in high school, I was a self-contained special education teacher. With my smaller classes, I hand graded all of my tests and really could use the results to pinpoint areas I needed to address with the class or with an individual. During semester finals the Scantron machines were in constant use. If I had had 150+ students like most of the gen ed teachers, I would have been in one of those lines.
My other concern is the ability of the machines to handle the large volume of jobs that could be generated. I would guess there are few of us who have not arrived at school early only to stand in line for the copier or to find it out of order. I got very good at locating and clearing jams which didn’t do me a lot of good when the copier ate my original. I’m sure we could fill pages with our own copier horror stories. Wonderful machines that I would have sincerely missed when I wasn’t cursing them.
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If we don’t stop all this nonsense, we will become a society of Deltas, not Alphas. Go watch Soylent Green!
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Lynda, you could also re-read Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
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Yes! Good suggestion!
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