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The Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing

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Mrs. Smith has been a very dedicated English teacher at Longview High School for years. She spends hours planning lessons and grading papers and does not mind using some of her off hours and free time to focus on her work, but with budget cuts and increasing student populations the work load is getting to become too cumbersome. Mrs. Smith is spending more and more of her own, unpaid time grading papers and the return time on papers can be up to three weeks. After discussing this issue with the rest of the English department, who voiced similar concerns, Mrs. Smith and her fellow teachers took this matter to the principal Ms. Rosenberg. The teachers suggested an up-and-coming technology, an automated essay grader, to assist in the process of …show more content…

They rose slightly in popularity in the 1990’s with the creation of the internet and the increased access to computers and storage space. Their related counterpart, automated scoring machines for multiple choice questions, has been very popular recently with the rise of standardized testing. The concept of having a machine or computer grade multiple choice and true-false questions is not highly contested because these are closed questions with a right and a wrong answer. The newer automated essay graders are in more muddy water because of the debate of whether or not a computer can actually score an essay with content, analysis, critical thinking, as well as ethos, pathos, and …show more content…

First, the automated essay graders are said to have been programmed based on human grading patterns and have been implemented in many schools already. According to a 2013 New York Times article by John Markoff, the startup company EdX, created by personnel from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has a program for automated essay grading, was derived from the assessment of human graders. EdX requires that the first one hundred essays are scored by a human grader, then the computer system will utilize varieties of machine-learning in order to grade other essays (Markoff). This system, therefore, is based on human teachers’ scoring criteria, but it can administer feedback instantly (Markoff). E-rater, another computer scoring program, uses similar ways to create the capability to score essays. According to Greg Phelan’s 2003 article, “For Student Essayists, An Automated Grader” the program must be trained to score essays by analyzing around 500 essays graded by two human graders. Phelan explains that “E-rater cannot read or judge an essay's quality but uses statistical analysis to determine which linguistic features are characteristic of each human scoring level, typically on a scale from 1 to 6” (Phelan). This means that if a human grader made a flaw, the program will not be one hundred

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