Opus 2014-184: CCC: Producing Little Robots

As the educational elite tries to take education down another notch with the Common Core Curriculum (CCC) they are trying to move all assessment (tests) to computers and away from human evaluation.  We had an interesting discussion at one of our faculty meetings recently.  Evidently the language arts tests have an essay section.  In the past this has never worked because it has been impossible to get objective grading standards that were workable.  What they are doing now is writing computer programs that will do the grading.

A book I read last year was talking about how the newspapers were going to computer generated stories.  Someone would feed in the basic data and the computer would write the story.

“These programs won’t soon be at the frontier of creative journalism, but they may soon be generating a lot of run-of-the-mill news for purposes of search and storage....Software is not only taking a shot at writing essays but also grading them and providing instant feedback on student work in progress, analysis that is well beyond grading multiple-choice quizzes.”  page 9

It was the second part that came home for me.  Not only are the computers going to grade the writing but they are going to teach writing.  It is now possible to have an English teacher who cannot write well and knows nothing about grammar or spelling.  Everything is done on the computer.  I know this is true because I have seen the software.  It exists and is installed at our school.

What is amusing is hearing the teachers tell how the computer can be fooled.  For instance they said you could get a higher score by inserting several lines of “x’s” in the middle of the text.  It makes the piece longer.  Can computers teach basics?  Yes, if the students are willing to learn.  Will they ever teach as well as a teacher who knows the subject and can respond to young people?  No.

But that is the wave of the future brought to you by educators who think technology is the answer to ignorant students and a satisfaction with the mediocre boilerplate that computers can generate.

Just don’t expect any great literature.

Cower, Tyler.  Average Is Over.  New York:  Dutton, 2013.

homo unius libri