From Library Babel Fish, April 26, 2012
The other day, I was nonplussed to read a recap of a study that found human and robot graders fared equally well in assessing the work of student writers. The robo-graders, according to the study, do as good a job as humans at assessing clarity and sentence structure. While my initial reaction was “huh?” it’s important to note that this study only compared processes for scoring standardized tests. It has nothing at all to do with what happens in the classroom when students are learning to write. In fact, it really has nothing to do with teaching or learning, only testing, and testing the wrong things at that.
Les Perelman, who directs the writing program at MIT, told a New York Times reporter he is not impressed by the robotic approach. He has tried out one of the robo-graders. It’s worth noting that only one company was willing to let him actually test the product – we’re supposed to trust machines to examine our students’ writing but we’re not allowed to examine the machine. You can read one of his nonsensical but high-scoring essays linked from the Times story. Apparently making sense is not important, nor is building an argument with truthful information, so long as the sentence structure is correct; extra points for using a big word when a simple word would do. Since using words to express meaning is not on the test, writing instruction will go backwards, to being grammar drills and five-paragraph exercises in vapidity. Pearson, a textbook company that markets a robo-grader, disagrees, saying essentially that any student clever enough to game the system deserves to score well. Education is learning how to follow rules, to play the game. Truth and meaning are irrelevant and so don’t count.
This depresses me so much I hardly know what to say.
Fortunately, Marc Bosquet said it for me in a thought-provoking essay at the Chronicle. He argues that too often we teach as if we are schooling robots to perform mechanically. Take the five-paragraph essay in which a student plucks lines of text from three sources as “evidence” to support an “argument” about which the writer cares not a jot. He writes, “the forces of standardization, bureaucratic control, and high-stakes assessment are steadily shrinking the zone in which free teaching and learning can take place.”
Commenting on the troubling findings of the Citation Project, he argues that the way we teach undergraduates to use sources fails to engage them with scholarly ideas because they encourage “quote farming.” Students don’t have to read or understand a source to use it for an argument. They simply have to mash up a random assortment of context-free material and document it. We are teaching students to argue the way lazy journalists do: “quote-farming, argument from authority, false binarism, fake objectivity.”
So much of what academic libraries do is in support of that very practice. We train students to mine a database efficiently for five scholarly articl