After grading papers over the spring break, many of which needed more work . . . much, much more work, I’m looking forward to edX software that supposedly will be provided free at some point, this according to an article in The New York Times last Thursday by John Markoff:
Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.
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.
As Sidney J. Mussberger (Paul Newman) might say in The Hudsucker Proxy, “Sure, sure, sure, Kid.”
There are always critics, but could you imagine a world in which essays were at least free of some of the errors I see over and over again? Fragments would be eliminated. Run-ons would be a thing of the past. Subjects and verbs would always agree. Verb tenses wouldn’t leap from past perfect to present to future perfect and back again. And commas and semicolons wouldn’t be sprinkled throughout papers like dandruff on a bald man’s shoulders.
I’m probably dreaming, but in dreams one finds hope. Let’s listen, e.g., to Professor Mark Shermis:
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.”
Exactly, though I wish he hadn’t placed me in competition with a machine.
Four media critics wrote about media violence’s effects in 
