Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays

guest · Aug 20, 2019

Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
Fooled by gibberish and highly susceptible to human bias, automated essay-scoring systems are being increasingly adopted
August 20, 2019
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa7dj9/flawed-algorithms-are-grading-millions-of-students-essays

Traditional paper-and-pencil tests have given way to computerized versions. And increasingly, the grading process—even for written essays—has also been turned over to algorithms.

But research from psychometricians—professionals who study testing—and AI experts, as well as documents obtained by Motherboard, show that these tools are susceptible to a flaw that has repeatedly sprung up in the AI world
And as a Motherboard experiment demonstrated, some of the systems can be fooled by nonsense essays with sophisticated vocabulary.

“The problem is that bias is another kind of pattern, and so these machine learning systems are also going to pick it up,” said Emily M. Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington. “And not only will these machine learning programs pick up bias in the training sets, they’ll amplify it.”
Research is scarce on the issue of machine scoring bias, partly due to the secrecy of the companies that create these systems. Test scoring vendors closely guard their algorithms, and states are wary of drawing attention to the fact that algorithms, not humans, are grading students’ work.
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