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.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/education/robo-readers-us...