Computers Used to Grade West Virginia Student Essays

Thousands of essays written by West Virginia students are largely going unread by human eyes.

The Charleston Daily Mail reports that a vast majority of responses for the writing portion of the West Virginia Educational Standards Test are being graded by a computer.

Education officials say the essays written on computers are sent to the state’s testing vendor that grades the essays using a computer program.

The program was developed using more than 10,000 essays written by students and graded by teachers.

That allowed the program to determine what the teachers valued in essays.

In a matter of seconds, the program can assess essays on six points: organization, development, sentence structure, word choice and grammar usage, and mechanics.

Officials say there are checks in place to maintain grading accuracy.

Do the students have an way to interact with this computer to find out why it graded the essay a certain way?  I thought the object of an essay test was for the students to learn to express themselves and for the teacher to interact with the student to not only grade the essay but explain in detail what would have made it better or why it was well done.  I cannot perceive a computer program being able to do this - knowing the hysterical mistakes that spell check and grammar check can make in a composition, I have my doubts any computer is competent to grade an essay!

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