Essay Grading :: essays research papers

I was going through a bunch of doddery magazines and newspapers this week when I came upon an article about some software that was being developed for teachers to use that would range essays. Over the past weekend I had the fortune to talk to my aunt who was a teacher and college professor before she retired. She said, there is nothing better to assess a students knowledge of a subject, than an essay especially when compared to a true or false or multiple choice exams.Unfortunately, grading essays is extremely time-consuming, and sometimes grading whoremonger be inconsistent. Now there is a computer program that can grade essays as well as human beings according to its developer Thomas Landauer. "From sixth graders to first-year medical students, we set about consistently good results," says Thomas Landauer, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado who has been working on the program for 10 years.The program, developed into its present give in 1997, uses "latent semantic analysis," a type of artificial intelligence based on complex mathematical formulas that attempt to mimic the human speech communication function. Developed by Landauer, psychologist Peter Foltz of New Mexico State University and doctoral student Darrell Laham of Colorado, the program cant get bored, rushed, sleepy or forgetful. And this, Landauer says, gives it perfect consistency in grading.To grade text, operators feed the computer commonplace information about the subject to be tested, which can include from 50,000 to 10 million words entered from course textbooks. The program thusly assigns a mathematical degree of similarity or distance between individual words used by the textbooks and other words in general use. This allows students to use different words that mean the same thing for example, "physician" and "doctor." The program then evaluates essays against sample tests that have already been graded by human instructors and profe ssors. It then takes the combination of words in the student essay and computes its similarity to the combination of words in the essays to come up with a grade.The student can expect a grade similar to the one on the sample essay his work most closely matches. To achieve this, the software uses about a gigabyte of computer memory, or ten times that of the average home personal computer. My computer at home has 128 megabytes of R.A.M (random access memory) so my computer would acquire about eight times more R.A.M to run this program.