technology to grade essay answers has not yet provided widespread acceptance by educations and has many critics.
[D] Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of Edx, predicted that the instant grading software would be a useful teaching tool,enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers . He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.“Thers is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr.Agarwal said, “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”
[E] But skeptics(怀疑者)say the automated system is no matter for live teachers. One longtime critic, Les Perelman，has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies claiming that the software compares well to human grades.
[F] He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition(呼吁) opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from famous people like Noam Chomsky.
[G] “Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read’. They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical (伦理)position, convincing argument, meaningful organization, and clarity, among others.”
[H] But EdX experts its software to be widely by schools and universities. It offers free online classes from Harvard, MIT and the University of California-Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes from Wellesley, Geogetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12 universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year, including adding international schools.
[I] The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders 100 essay or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantly. The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical (数字的) rank. [J] Edx is not the first to use the automated assessment technology, which dates to early computers in the 1960s. there is now a range of companies offering commercial programs to grade written test answers,
and four states — Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia — are using some form of the technology in second schools. A fifth, Indiana, has experimented with it. In some cases the software is used as a “second reader”, to check the reliability of the human graders. [K] But the growing influence of the Edx consortium to set standards is likely to give the technology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announced that it would work with EdX to develop a joint educational system that will make use of the automated assessment technology.
[L] Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “it allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating (吸引) to ward resubmitting the work until they get it right, ” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.
[M] Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by one of the Hewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two $100,000 Prizes aimed at improving software that grades essay and short answers. More than 150 teams entered each category. A winner of
one of the Hewlett contents, Vik Paruchurt was hired by EdX to help design its assessment software.
[N] “One of our focus is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests”. The challenge is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and they take a lot of more time.
[O] Mark D.Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology — though imperfect — has a place in educational settings. [P] With increasing large class, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of teaching is much better than at most schools.
[Q] “Often they come from very famous institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine over could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.” 注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。