Frankly, I can't believe what I am reading. The idea that some "AI" grades essays automatically is idiotic and has nothing to do with education. Where is the place for discussions? Where is the place for ideas confrontation? Where is the place for writing style development? How this AI is supposed to grade things like repetitions (that can be either good rhetorical tool or a mistake, depending on context), etc?
Who the hell came out with such an idea. I would even hesitate to use "AI" for automatic spell checking as it is sufficient to give some character unusual name and it will be marked as error.
My guess is that soon or later people will learn how to game that AI. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some software that will generate essay that Utah "AI" likes.
The final paragraph from that example is steaming gibberish that nobody could mistake for English:
"Calling has not, and undoubtedly never will be aggravating in the way we encounter mortification but delineate the reprimand that should be inclination. Nonetheless, armed with the knowledge that the analysis augurs stealth with propagandists, almost all of the utterances on my authorization journey. Since sanctions are performed at knowledge, a quantity of vocation can be more gaudily inspected. Knowledge will always be a part of society.Vocation is the most presumptuously perilous assassination of mankind."
Yet the robo-scoring acclaims it as:
* articulates a clear and insightful position on the issue in accordance with the assigned task
* develops the position fully with compelling reasons and/or persuasive examples
* sustains a well-focused, well-organized analysis, connecting ideas logically
* conveys ideas fluently and precisely, using effective vocabulary and sentence variety
* demonstrates superior facility with the conventions of standard written English (i.e., grammar, usage, and mechanics) but may have minor errors
Any teacher faced with the requirement to use such tools would be better placed instructing their class on civil disobedience.
There's 2 ways of finding out these artifacts of AI essay grading: pure luck, and being able to afford extensive test-prep (rich).
The luck one can't be accounted for. So I im lead to believe that the purpose of these essays and their AI grading is to find and escalate rich people.
'There's a reason why they're poor. Better pull themselves up by the bootstraps."
Mixed alongside with poverty stricken neighborhoods are the primary funding, resulting in poor school systems. And those students obviously wont have the money or the access to get the test-prep needed to "succeed".
Professor Perelman had also previously demonstrated that this sort of scoring was going on when essays were scored by humans [1].
I suspect that, in addition to the scoring rules being written for speed and frugality, they were shaped by a poorly thought out attempt to make the scoring 'objective', and independent of the scorer's beliefs, attitudes and unconscious biases.
In one sense, this software (I will not call it 'AI') is an extension of all those bad ideas, only greatly amplified in a way that only software can.
In evolutionary biology, there is the concept of 'honest signalling'[2], a true and unfakable indicator, to a potential mate or predator, of an animal's fitness. That is what we are missing here.
Anpther issue is one of copyright: obviously the student is the author. And we all know that the ML scoring subcontractor is keeping copies, with human ratings for later retraining purpouses.
At the time the student takes the test, he should be prompted with the informed choice asking him to grant either 1) no license to keep a copy for training purpouses 2) a non-exclusive license, and the website where he can get a copy of his own essay 3) a public domain license, again with the relevant domain linked so he can find his own and other's essays. 4) any of the above or other as a function of the resulting grade!
At the same time he should also specify his desire for or against attribution, again probably best as a function of the resulting grade. And under what moniker he wishes this contribution to exist.
These options to be filled out during exam time should have no default options (no opt-out), and preferably should be standardized by the community and lobbied for to be mandatorily enforced at state or federal level (forcing examinations to present the student with an informed choice)
A public dataset of legally obtained essays (without scores or names) would already be a very important first step to invite others to make actual performant ML grading systems.
I don't believe the current datasets in these "non-profit" organizations actually comply with copyright law, organizations who don't profit from the grading service towards the state, but do provide a stable ML job on the income from charging the people with financial means to test submissions, enabling a stealth class based society.
I'd guess this is a product of dwindling state finances and contempt for any form of real education. AI's are orders of magnitude cheaper than real teachers. They also don't form unions and wouldn't voice any opposition against changes in the curiculum.
They are also pretty useless, as you have pointed out. The consequences of this policy will be postponed until the students reach a certain age -- that'll be like 10-15 years in the future.
> My guess is that soon or later people will learn how to game that AI.
To be fair, the GP here is specifically describing that he gamed the AI via a copy-paste of a critique of the AI, his kid submitted it on their own accord, it was graded without comment, and then when the GP went into comment on the gaming of the AI, the teacher not only did not care that the AI was gamed, but expressed gratitude for the AI saving hours of work, still ignoring that the AI fundamentally made things worse, all at the expense of the entire point of being a teacher in the first place.
The issue, for the teacher, is that in 'the system' in which they collect a pay-check, the AI works flawlessly. The point, for the teacher, is not to educate children. It is to have assignments that children pass with some sort of distribution that can be sent in and calculated by some person in a beige suit, wide tie, and hair troubles. The difference is subtle at first, but when you get further along to the point where the GP is sitting, then the difference is comical.
The AI allows the teacher to increase their effiency in processing assignments, ones that never really mattered to the teacher in the first place. In valley-speak: the incentives are not aligned.
I can't believe either, it's completely ridiculous. They're basically claiming that they've developed a general AI. It's like some part of population is living in different fantasy worlds and makes policy decisions accordingly.
It's progress built on top of an assumption of never-ending, unsustainable growth. Unfortunately for everyone else much of the world has been dragged into the rat race along with us.
I'd argue that the expectation of perpetual population growth is one of the big problems (the unsustainability of social security bottlenecking at the baby boomers being an obvious example).
There is a compelling case for immigration for that sake alone.
I agree with you wholeheartedly but I think there's a stronger argument to be made here: the algorithms being used "work" only on a correlation based on an ignorance of the scoring metric. If the students under test knew even sketchily how the system worked, e.g., points deducted if your average sentence word length > 7, points added if your word length stddev is greater than 2, and the students could meaningfully push their scores up by focusing on these proxies that don't _actually_ measure what a human would say is quality work - or even they can even get gibberish[0] rated highly - then the whole thing is a fraud. No one will stand for a grading system that only works by virtue of obscurity.
It is classic beancounter thinking in the worst way, the worst stereotype of a MBA trying to minimize cost beyond all reason cutting corners. Even when it saws at the branch they sit upon.
It is frankly a sign of a diseased culture to use it in any capacity except an exercise to improve AI.
Who the hell came out with such an idea. I would even hesitate to use "AI" for automatic spell checking as it is sufficient to give some character unusual name and it will be marked as error.
My guess is that soon or later people will learn how to game that AI. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some software that will generate essay that Utah "AI" likes.