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Reasons for or against computer-scoring of essays

I have 80 World Literature students.    If I assign a 3-page essay, how much time should I spend reading and marking and scoring each essay?   10 minutes each (on average, plus typical paper-shuffling or computer startup time) totals 6 hours.   My instructional time with those same students (again, given typical attendance administrative settling down time; and including occasional summative assessments) is 3.5 hours per week.   In my conversations with several different principals on this topic, all have cannily refused to even mention an expected number.

When I am scoring an essay, one of the big psychological hurdles is getting past any misspellings or minor grammar errors.   My reader-brain finds it hard to avoid marking those errors, or to avoid reducing some related score because of those errors.  A computer can catch many of those minor spelling, punctuation, word-choice, usage errors (note: the computer does not correct them, a la MS-Word spellcheck; rather, it flags errors so that the student must make the correction, thereby reinforcing the idea and hopefully correcting the neural pathways that caused the initial error).    If the computer can do this legwork in advance, it is granting students a benefit in correcting them sooner and less emotionally; it is also granting me time to look at their writing in more depth, as the minor errors are out of the way.  We trust that the computer’s response will also help the students re-look, revise their own writing in a less emotional setting, thereby helping them better edit their own work before I see it.  

Danger, Will Robinson!
There is a danger that I may rely only on the computer score, and thus eliminate human sensibility from the score.  In my limited experience, the WPP computer scores for organization and development and support are much less accurate than are the scores for mechanics.  

However, there is certainly a temptation, on the part of both teachers and administrators, to fall back on the automated process -- it is sure tempting to feel that I might not have to spend my entire weekend marking essays.  And the machine is certainly “objective,” no?   Particularly given the trend toward standards-based grading, clear objectives and rubrics, there is a temptation to substitute the machine and entirely eliminate human scoring of essays.   The Principal may also reduce those pesky English teachers demands for reduced class load, and declare increased instructional time!

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