Let your robots do the marking?

A short article appearing in the Independent newspaper on April 6th highlights the tensions brewing because of the use of marking software. Anant Agarwal, president of EdX, (Harvard and MIT's non-profit making arm that runs MOOCs), says that the software will be a boon to learning online in the future, because it will allow students to rewrite and resubmit their essays time and again, to improve their grades. He also argues that instant feedback is what today's students crave. What he doesn't say is that it's an essential part of the management of MOOCs, especially if they are regularly enrolling upwards of 100,000 students for each course. How else are they going to assess and mark all those students' work?

This entire approach is reminiscent of the Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) programs of the 1980s, where students worked their way through a linear course of study, interspersed with quizzes and questions to test what they could remember, and a remedial loop to send them back to 'relearn' if they didn't make the grade. The computer marking of that time was simplistic and mainly used for multiple choice questions. All well and good for the 80s, but is it appropriate for today? And even more importantly, are computer software programs actually capable of marking free form essays?

Many academics believe not, and some have even set up an online petition against the use of marking software, claiming that it computers cannot 'read' student essays, are unable to measure the essentials of human communication. They fail, say the protest group, to cope with detecting accuracy, reasoning and critical thinking, adequacy of evidence, ethical issues and stances, convincing arguments, clarity and veracity. So far, around 2000 academics have signed the petition. What do you think?


Photo by Steve Wheeler


Let your robots do the marking? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.