I am writing in response to your article “Essay-Grading
Software Offers Professors a Break” by John Markoff. The
article makes lots of important points about the essay-
grading software whether if it is good enough to use it or
not. I can see that some people think we can use it and
some don’t. As a student I believe that serious problems
like the software being unable to grade effective essays,
being unable to give feedback as good as professors and
it being able to get hacked or fooled, prevent it from
surpassing the traditional way of learning.
In the article, we can see that the software is unable to
grade effective essays. The author gives a quote from
a group which is called “Professionals Against Machine
Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment"
and who is against this type of software. The group says
“They cannot measure the essentials of effective written
communication,” referring to the software. This quote
implies the idea that the software can’t understand
and grade the connotations of the words, the figurative
language, and many other parts. Without these parts
of the effective essays, the grading won’t be fair and
accurate. For example, a student who wrote an effective
essay with an excellent organization and used creative
figurative language will get the same or a lower grade
than a student who wrote an effective essay without
both a meaningful organization and figurative language.
However, a professor can do all of these things without
having really crucial problems that can create injustice
among the grades and make a student’s life worse by
giving him a lower grade than the grade he deserves.
Furthermore, the article informs us that the software
can get fooled. Being a student also makes me
knowledgeable about the fact that we, as students, are
always trying to get a high grade without exerting any
effort and this leads me to think that the students can
fool or hack the software to get a high grade. It may seem
impossible for some people to hack something, such as a
computer program. However, hacking is a very common
thing around the world nowadays, and we can see a
lot of examples of it, such as people hacking new video
games to get them free. As a result of technology with
unlimited opportunities, a student can easily hack the
software to get a high grade. In addition to the hacking,
fooling the software will be a common choice among
the students because it is easier than hacking and the
author gives us an example of it. The author mentions
an expert named Les Perelman and what he did by
saying “…Les Perelman, has drawn national attention
several times for putting together nonsense essays that
have fooled software …” which shows that it is pretty
The author mentions a notable feature in the software,
which is the software can immediately give students
feedback on their essays. However, this speed advantage
comes with a remarkable disadvantage because the
software can’t give feedback as good as professors.
We can understand it from Mark D. Shermis’, who is a
professor at the University of Akron in Ohio. He says
“They do a much better job of providing feedback than
a machine ever could,” and when we really compare
the capacity of the machine to a professor, we can see
that the quote is correct because machines are not as
good as professors. For example, a computer program
can’t give detailed feedback about the answer because
it can neither understand the essay nor analyze it but
only checks so it will always give general feedback that
won’t help the students like “Your answer is not correct.”
However, a professor can give detailed feedback by
showing the mistakes the students did and giving specific
feedback about them, which will make the students
understand their mistakes and improve themselves by
learning from their mistakes until they get a high score.
Although some people think that this software will be
very useful, I believe that the crucial problems; which
are it can get hacked or fooled, can’t give feedback as
good as professors and can’t grade effective essays, will
prevent it from surpassing the traditional way. Even if
you think these are not that important, let me ask a
question. Would you like to get kicked out of your school
because of low grades that are mistakenly given by
software?
Sincerely Yours,
Emirhan KILIÇ
9-C
CETACEAN
The poem "Cetacean" written by Peter Reading describes
the sighting of huge whales by a group of people on a
boat in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. In
the poem, Reading does not show his attitude towards
whales. It is an anti-poem that refuses to apply poetic
techniques.
First of all, Reading followed a deliberately non-poetic
structure to encourage the readers to explore their own
feelings and emotions about giant whales. To achieve
this, the speaker decided to write the poem in prose
instead of following poetic structure. For example, he
THE CLAPPER 2018 - 2019
23
Dear Sir or Madam
easy to fool a software that can't understand the essay
but only can check it. However, the students can’t fool
the experienced professors because the professors read
everything carefully and know all tricks that students
can use to fool them because they have done this job
for a long time.