Post by JohnThanks for this reply Barb
To be a bit more specific I am looking for for software that can mark
essays by content - perhaps in comparison to some model answers that
might be used to "calibrate" the software before using it?
Like giving a model answer to a Teaching Assistant for them to mark
against, right?
Post by JohnI have come across a few bits of software that can assess more
structured questioning but nothing so far on unstructured questioning.
Perhaps that's because it is too difficult - I don't know?
Yes, it is much too difficult. For starters, it requires that the
software adequately "understand" the English (or other natural language)
that the essay is written in. This problem has been studied for decades,
and the meagre results so far indicated that it's a very very hard
problem.
Then, the software needs to relate the essay to a large amount of
information about the topic of the essay, rhetorical and stylistic aspects
of essay writing, etc. These are also very very hard problems. There is
a lot of ongoing research on software to usefully handle "real world" and
"common sense" information -- do a search on "cyc ontologies" to get some
idea of how complex this is.
We unconsciously do a huge amount of processing when reading and
understanding. Since it's unconscious it feels effortless. But, attempts
to write software to do these things have given us a glimpse of just how
vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly difficult it is.
Post by JohnGood point on the automated generation of essay answers - now that I'm
sufficiently paranoid about it - are there any software solutions that
can detect this?
There is software that can help detect blatant copying of one student by
another, or a joint effort handed in by more than one student. But AFAIK
there's no software that can detect custom software-generated essays; I
guess the best you can do is require each student to give a brief oral
presentation of their essay and answer a few questions about it. But of
course that takes time.
I infer you are dealing with a large class, in which case IMO the problem
of cheating is unsolvable. For example, the most common way to cheat is
just to pay someone else to write the essay. You would probably be
shocked at how common this is.
Post by JohnJohn
Post by Barb KnoxPost by JohnHi - I'm looking for a software solution that can mark essays - does
anyone know of any options?
That's a tall order. Maybe with a sufficiently tight specification you
could get something useful. What specific sorts of critera do you want to
mark the essays against? Software can mark well for total word count,
average sentence length (Gunning Fog index), etc.; pretty well for
spelling; not so well for grammar; and hopelessly for anything that
actually requires understanding the content of the essay.
Note that it's actually much easier to make software that *writes*
plausible essays than reads them. Maybe some of your students are already
handing in computer-generated essays.
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