Slashdot pointed me to this New York Times article about computerized grading of student essays. Apparently, every high school junior in the state of Indiana is now required to take an essay test that is graded by a computer.
With the increasing number of mandates to test student writing, "there's a certain inevitability to computerized essay grading," said Stan Jones, Indiana's commissioner of higher education. Indiana's computerized essay scoring, he said, will reduce by half the cost of administering a pencil-and-paper test and will free teachers from distributing, collecting and, above all, grading thousands of test booklets.
I've blogged more on this over at Word Munger.
And Tail Wags Dog!
I hate to be a curmudgeon here, but it's pretty obvious to me that any computer scoring method will focus on surface and structural errors at the expense of quality content. I went to some panels on this subject at the last C&W and was totally unimpressed with electronic testing services. Students were finding some pretty hilarious ways to buck the system (esp. by writing grammatically correct, 5-paragraph essays of pure gibberish).
"Smart" teachers will quickly figure out which features are scrutinized by the software and teach students how to win the best scores.