mathbabe

Agreed on all points, but I also would add something far more sinister: The transformation of education from an activity focused on the development of our intellects–the core of our humanness and therefore humanity–into a normalizing of our behavior according to our wanna-be corporate masters.

The goal of writing is to express one’s thoughts in a way that enables others (i.e., humans) to at least grasp, if not intimately “share”, those thoughts. Writing, like speech, is a fundamental human activity that is critical for civilized societies to exist. To teach writing, then, is to help a student develop their skills to understand, organize, and express their thoughts. Traditionally, this was done by teaching the Trivium (logic, grammar, and rhetoric) to enable students to think clearly, express themselves accurately, and argue convincingly.

Since the goal of writing is to extend one’s internal understanding to another through written expression, students need skilled and experienced human colleagues to hone their skills. At best, a computer can only offer a program that executes some sort of pattern analysis and scoring according to a correlative model that is based on some one’s (or group’s) view of what “good” writing looks like. In other words, since computers don’t “think” (a minor point that seems lost on most journalists, business types, and teachers), the computer can only try to find correlative similarities between submitted writings and some aggregate model of writing. To the computer, the submitted writing is just a string of encoded electoral impulses that are manipulated according to some algorithm to produce an encoded output that is displayed in a form that we can perceive. But to call that “understanding” is a travesty.

In fact that defeats the very purpose of writing, since there can be no hope of establishing an understanding–and hence communication–between the writer and the reviewer. Computers don’t understand anything; hence any output from the computer can’t convey any understanding of the subject essay. The teacher who can only read the computer’s assessment thus can’t understand the writing. How then, can this serve the purpose of training and coaching good writers?

The quotes from the Economist seem to be almost verbatim statements from a marketing rep. The “bias” angle is really marketing speciousness at its worst. The issue in grading fairness isn’t bias, it’s prejudice. Yes, we all have biases; so what? Good teachers, like all good readers and writers, understand their biases and consciously keep them in check. There are graders out there who are fair, and that’s the goal. And since writing is about communication between human beings, and not some rule-based, formalized, abstract exercise like mathematics or symbolic logic, fairness is what matters.

Worse, who says the computer (really the underlying algorithm) isn’t biased itself? The algorithm has to be based on a model of “good” writing. But machines can’t judge writing; so, the model has to be based on “biased” human beings! And bringing in extraneous information about social sites, credit scores, etc. only shows that the bias of the computer will be far more extensive than any human teacher.

So, if the idea of computer grading actually defeats the purpose of writing, and if the very programs that do the “grading” are likely to be at least as biased if not more biased than human graders, then what’s the point? Well, profits for companies that make the software are important. But there’s much more at stake. Replacing writing teachers is just another nail in the coffin of humanities education. Education will become still more like technical training. Worse, as you noted Cathy, by forcing students to “write to the model”, the owners of the code, like Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch, will actively mold the mind of the young to their own models of humanity. And we’re talking about some pretty withered human beings here.

Time for home schooling.

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