![]() You may have heard of the edX automated essay scoring algorithm, and the backlash such as this and this to it and AES. Justin found a job at MI, and I went to work for edX, a massively open online class (MOOC) provider based in the Boston area, where I started to apply what I learned. We had made some interesting advances, and now possessed a lot of knowledge, but so what? The knowledge was not being applied to anything, and there is a huge gap between theoretical and real-world results. But the luster quickly faded post-contest. I was able to spend every day learning, striving, and implementing (I may have had a less rosy recollection had I not done so well). You can find the excellent papers from the winners, as well as their code, here.Īs strange as it sounds, even though I was sitting at my computer, coding for hours on end, participating in those competitions was a lot of fun. (MI), and came in first place on the leaderboard, although we were ineligible for prizes due to our company affiliation. In a second competition for short answers, we teamed up with Measurement, Inc. Most of the major assessment companies (think Pearson, McGraw-Hill, etc) also participated, but more on this later. I was fortunate enough to be able to work with Justin Fister, and we ended up coming in 3rd place out of 156 teams in the competition. ![]() But as time went on, I became more and more invested in the subject, and began to recall my own experiences with higher education and writing. I won’t try to dance around the issue I initially competed because I noticed that some extremely smart people were in it, and I wanted to see how I stacked up. ![]() Imagine my surprise when I found a three month long competition sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation, and hosted by Kaggle, that aimed to develop algorithms to automatically score essays. I ended up leaving the foreign service, a decision that led to me learning programming and machine learning, the art of how to teach computers to predict things, through online materials. I later joined the US foreign service, a career that required me to do a lot of writing (see: Wikileaks cables). Afterwards, this gave me a keen interest in trying to find ways to personalize learning. I never knew what I wanted out of my life when I was in school, and wouldn’t have seen college as the way to get there even if I had. I didn’t know it at the time, but my interest in AES began with my own struggles with higher education. I have been involved in the AES field for 2 years now, but the building blocks were laid well before that. I’m going to ramble a bit here, so please indulge me. But is this what automated essay scoring (AES) is? If not, what is it? In this article, I aim to explore what AES is, the state of field, some of the lessons I have learned along the way, and where I think it is going. ![]() Given this, people react badly to the notion that their essays may be scored not by a human teacher, but by machine.Ī piece of software coldly judging the quality of our carefully constructed phrases and metaphors based on unknown criteria is more than most writers can bear. The sometimes enjoyable process of researching the topic and composing the paper can take hours and hours of careful work. We’ve all written essays, primarily while we were in school. ![]()
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