Wednesday, May 11, 2005
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COLUMBIA: Student essays always seem to be riddled with the same sorts of flaws. So Sociology Professor Ed Brent decided to hand the work off — to a computer. Students in Prof. Brent's Introduction to Sociology course at the University of Missouri-Columbia now submit drafts through the SAGrader software he designed. It counts the number of points he wanted his students to include and analyses how well concepts are explained. And within seconds, students have a score. It used to be the students who looked for shortcuts, shopping for papers online or pilfering parts of an assignment with a simple Google search. Now, teachers and professors are realising that they, too, can tap technology for a facet of academia long reserved for a teacher alone with a red pen. Software now scores everything from routine assignments in high school English classes to an essay on the GMAT, the standardised test for business school admission. (The essay sections just added to the Scholastic Aptitude Test for humans grade the college-bound). Though Prof. Brent and his two teaching assistants still handle final papers — and grades — students are encouraged to use SAGrader for a better shot at an ``A.'' ``I don't think we want to replace humans,'' Prof. Brent said. ``But we want to do the fun stuff, the challenging stuff. And the computer can do the tedious but necessary stuff.'' Developed with National Science Foundation funding, SAGrader is so far used only in Prof. Brent's classroom. Like other essay-grading software, it analyses sentences and paragraphs, looking for keywords as well as the relationship between terms.
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