A new smart-scoring system for UF’s popular online general psychology course has students questioning whether technology should have a place in the grading process.
The system, called Writing Space, grades student essays within seconds of their submission and was first put into use 18 months ago after more than two decades of research and development by Pearson.
Wendy Gordon, the company’s executive marketing manager, said the system uses patented knowledge-analysis technologies to find correlations between submitted content and more than 400 essays graded previously by expert human readers.
The program assesses both the content and the mechanical aspects of writing, she said.
“One of the benefits of having this type of scoring is that it takes the subjectivity out,” Gordon said. “The way a human grades the first paper may be different than the way the last one is graded.”
UF psychology lecturer Nicole Dorey said she has seen student scores improve since the technology became available last year.
However, some students still aren’t satisfied.
Julia Geraldeli, an 18-year-old UF exploratory freshman, said she could live with the grades she has received, but not until she knows how they were calculated.
She said any comments and suggestions for improvement she received along with her grades have been vague.
“I feel like I’m doing what they’re asking and answering all parts of the question,” Geraldeli said. “I have no idea how it’s working.”
Ronald Boyett, a 20-year-old UF finance and sports management sophomore, said even though students who know the material should do fine, he is upset by the technology’s inconsistency.
“The first assignment I had I thought I did a better job and I got an eight. I don’t think the second one was as well-written, but I got a 10,” Boyett said. “There’s a bit of an accuracy issue there.”
Dorey said although the essays graded using this technology account for about only 7 percent of students’ total course grade, she has kept the option open for students to disagree with their computer-generated score.
“I have a dispute process so if they’re not happy with the grading … I’ll grade it by hand for them,” she said.
Geraldeli said she’s glad students are still able to request that their papers be graded the old-fashioned way.
“At least that way we could get real feedback … We could ask questions and understand why we got something wrong,” she said. “A computer can’t do that.”
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 2/6/2014 under the headline "Students wary of electronic essay-grading system at UF"]
