The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) proposes to use a program called automated essay scoring for all primary and secondary schools. According to the author of this piece, (WARNING BS spelled out in article) you will receive a grade within seconds and as long as you follow “the script” you’ll get a good grade. So you can be very persuasive in your paper, but it doesn’t really have to say much of anything of worth and you get a good grade for a bunch of BS. I hope they reconsider their proposal and keep the good ol’ human brain in the loop. However, the good thing about all of this is that AI isn’t as advanced as some would think and Skynet is still a long time from becoming self-aware.



But it generally does not learn the criteria by which humans mark essays. Rather, machine learning consists of multiple layers of so-called “artificial neurons”. These are statistical values that are gradually adjusted during the training period to associate certain inputs (structural text patterns, vocabulary, key words, semantic structure, paragraphing and sentence length) with certain outputs (high grades or low grades).

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Why Marking Essays by Algorithm Risks Rewarding the Writing of BS