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Posted June 4, 2001
Teacher Vsn. 2.0By Shane Harris
A for-profit subsidiary of Educational Testing Service, the organization that administers the SAT, has a new tool to do some of teachers’ hardest work for them. It’s a software program called e-rater, which claims to be able to read students’ essays and assign them the same score as a human grader 97 percent of the time. The papers are judged based on a two-second scan that evaluates syntax, organization, clarity and vocabulary against a rubric based on other essays that teachers have given high marks.
ETS has lost money over the past decade by investing heavily in computer-based exams. Last year, the company refocused its strategy to go after the lucrative pre-college testing market and is betting on the success of e-rater. ETS Technologies, the for-profit arm of the testing giant, has begun selling schools annual subscriptions to the service. The Chicago Tribune reports that about 65 schools began pilot programs last fall to test the e-rater program.
It’s no secret that teachers suffer through long days and long nights grading homework assignments, tests and essays. The amount of extracurricular work teachers must suffer is outrageous, but what is even more ridiculous is that any educator would flirt with the notion of replacing a human being with a computer when it comes time to grade a student’s writing abilities. Grammar, pronoun reference, subject-verb agreement — these are things that are either right or wrong. But argument construction, word choice, metaphor, allusion — these are the skills that make a writer unique, and it’s a fundamental disservice to deny students the ability to become better craftspeople by handing over their words to a machine that’s merely capable of tallying up their split infinitives.
I remember my ninth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Hagood, telling me that my response to an essay question on the book Watership Down was “too flowery.” That stuck with me, because one of my teachers was looking to the design and style of my work as it related to the overall point I was trying to make. And her criticism made me want to do a better job next time.
In a time when parents are complaining about teacher inattention to their students, and teachers are pressured by administrators and legislators to bump up their kids’ test scores in a hurry, why would anyone support a program that places more distance between educators and those whom they are supposed to teach? And there is the sheer hypocrisy of a teacher asking a student to revise a paper that the teacher hasn’t even read.
If teachers are so desperate that they are willing to turn to a computer to grade the written word for them, then they are sending a powerful signal to administrators that the school system needs to wake up and immediately reevaluate how it allocates its resources. Are teachers so exhausted because they have to grade 40 or 50 papers after tending to their other responsibilities? Then let’s address that issue by finding ways to reduce class size and get teachers the help they need, either in human form or in dollars.
Paying a machine to act like a teacher. If you’re out there, Mrs. Hagood, welcome to the brave new world.
Shane Harris is a former Governing research associate.
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Readers’ Responses:
DON’T BE FOOLED
Interesting article. The most humorous part was the comment regarding teachers working long hard hours after work. Waaaaaaa!
When I taught high school history, English teachers taught four periods a day and had two planning periods. I was called into the principal's office regarding my assignment of an essay for homework. Parents thought that it was unfair that a history teacher would expect 11th-graders to write a one-page essay. That was best left for English classes, I was told by the school administration.
I tried to use short answers on tests. Again, I got into trouble. The students could not write short, two- or three-sentence responses.
What the English teachers were teaching in their classrooms, I will never know. What did they do during the planning periods? Watch talk shows on television and gossip about one another.
In short, don't be fooled by the low-pay, over-worked teacher. For each one that is, there are three or four sitting on their duff collecting a salary for doing nothing.
David Greene
THE DIFFICULTY OF CATCHING EVERYTHING
Shane Harris's piece assumes that teachers would use this tool as the complete and sole evaluation of student writing. Having taught writing and watched my own children's papers come home with incomplete, inadequate or just plain wrong "corrections," I can attest to the difficulty of catching everything that ought to be pointed out to the student writer. If the software can catch the mechanics (and that's a big if), the teacher could concentrate more on the very style, tone and effectiveness issues Harris desires. The best teachers will probably use the tool this way very consistently, the worst teachers will live up to Harris's fears, and most teachers who manage to use the tool at all will probably fall somewhere in the vast middle.
Laura Behrens
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