Peter Greene recognizes one of the great education heroes of our age, Dr. Lester Perelman, who retired a few years ago from MIT, where he taught writing. Les Perelman carefully and thoroughly debunked “robograding” of student essays. ETS had a robograder that allegedly graded thousands of essays in a minute or less.
Perelman showed that students could write nonsensical paragraphs containing blatant inaccuracies yet get a high score from the robograder.
Greene points out that Perelman singlehandedly shot down Australia’s plan to adopt robograding for student essays.
Perelman reviewed the Australian writing assessment and summarized how to get a high test score:
Learn a bunch of big spelling words, and throw them in. Don’t worry about meaning, but do worry about spelling them correctly. Repeat the ideas in the prompt often.
Five paragraph essay all the way. Every paragraph should be four sentences; don’t worry about repeating yourself to get there. Start the last paragraph with “In conclusion,” then repeat your thesis from graph #1. Somewhere work in a sentence with the structure “Although x (sentence), y (sentence). (Perelman’s example– Although these instructions are stupid, they will produce a high mark on the NAPLAN essay.)
Use “you” and ask questions. Use connectors like “moreover” or “however.” Start sentences with “In my opinion” or “I believe that” (not for the first or last time, Strunk and White are spinning in their graves). Repeat words and phrases often, and throw in passive voice (whirrrrr). Throw in one or two adjectives next to nouns.
For narrative essays, just steal a story from a movie or tv show– markers are explicitly instructed to ignore that they recognize a story.
And the final and most important rule– never write like this except for essay tests like the NAPLAN.
For his role in junking the Australian fascinating with robograding and helping to undermine its obsession with national testing, Perelman was honored by the New South Wales Teachers Federation as a “Champion of Public Education.”
In his acceptance speech, Perelman said:
Free public education is the cornerstone of a stable democratic and free society.
The main problem with edu-business [for profit entities in education] is that the most important products of education, such as critical thinking and analysis, are both the least tangible and the least profitable. They are expensive both in staffing and in assessment. Edu-business wants to MacDonald-ize education, make it cheap to produce and distribute, highly profitable and with little nutritive value. It wants, like Dickens’ Gradgrind, to focus on relatively unimportant facts and rules that can literally be mechanically taught and mechanically counted. Edu-business values psychometricians over practitioners, testers over teachers, reliability over validity.
Peter Greene observed:
It’s a little long for a t-shirt, but it might be worth the effort.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The main problem with edu-business [for profit entities in education] is that the most important products of education, such as critical thinking and analysis, are both the least tangible and the least profitable. They are expensive both in staffing and in assessment.”
Critical thinking, analysis and content are all essential to comprehensive education. We should first start with politicians and administrators that can think critically. If we had critical thinkers in positions of authority, we would not be sinking public funds into cyber edu-garbage. Online programming is the intellectual equivalent of feeding young people on a McDonald’s fast food diet. It may sate hunger, but it is nutritionally unbalanced.
Many years ago in education, teachers and administrators had to adhere to a reasoned process for any new adoptions. The first rule was that there had to be evidence behind the proposal. Then, there were site visitations to see the proposed product in action. Then, a pilot program that was followed by adoption or rejection based on the findings. School districts and certainly not whole states did not invite tech companies into schools to “reinvent education.” This equally as insane and unprofessional as allowing a computer to give passing grades to gibberish. Computer companies will sell anything to make money. It is up to people in positions of authority to be discriminating, informed consumers.
MIT obviously uses the same model as NAPLAN to produce some of their “engineering”, the OpenAg Food Computer (TM), for example.
All manure and no nutrition.
I always thought the term “Artificial Intelligence” is an OXYMORON.
when deepest human intelligence would know to avoid it: our embracing of it is the other side of being smart?
Thank you, Peter Greene, for reminding us of this farce and how Dr. Perelman exposed it.
All I can say is: Obsequious condescension juxtaposed with unmitigated hyperbole.
This is reminiscent of the “writing test” i had to take to get my BS degree in chemistry back in the 1960s. I left off taking the thing until the last minute, so I was “under the gun.” We were given Blue Books and a set of topics from which to choose.
I decided to “Dick and Jane” it. I avoided polysyllabic words and decided on short sentences in short paragraphs. Three paragraphs was my goal, the minimum for an introduction, body, and conclusion. And, of course, the last paragraph began “In conclusion …” It took me a bit under ten minutes of the one-hour test period to do this. I was about to turn in my booklet and then I thought better of it. I reopened the booklet and wrote a short outline of what I had written on the inside cover. (Outlining was strongly recommended back in the day.)
These were human graded then, of course, and when the results were posted, the word “passed” was next to my name. There were more than a few who failed the test however.