Robo-Readers? No thank you.

Robo-readers?  Really? Is this what our society is coming to? A time where we now have robots reading student’s essays because it’s faster? This to me does not seem right at all.

I believe that it would be impossible for a Robo-reader to accurately evaluate someone’s writing because of how fasts they go through them, and for the simple fact that it is not a human doing the reading. Michael Winerip from the New York Times says that most of these Robo-readers, specifically the e-Rater cannot identify truth. “E-Rater doesn’t care if you say the War of 1812 started in 1945.” This is unacceptable. If the Robo-readers are unable to identify truth, how is that accurately evaluating the writing? It’s not.

From the E-Rater website, it shows all the many different features of what the e-rater is able to do. Some of the main ones are: lexical complexity/diction, proportion of grammar errors, and proportion of style comments. These things, yes, are good things to look at in a paper, but they are not the most important things. True statements and facts are what should be included and is what the paper should be graded on. Because the e-rater only scores on the basis of whether or not you can write sophistically does not show whether or not it is a good paper. Some papers, even if they are shorter and use simple sentences are still good pieces of writing, but the e-rater will no score from this because to it, it is not a well-written essay.

We all know that when we are assigned a paper, that someone is going to have to read it and grade it, and that person is our teacher. For them, this is very time consuming, but it is still better than having a robot read the paper. Torie Bosch asks the question of whether or not Robo-readers would ever be able to match the effects that a teacher has on the reading of a paper. She says that with the automated grading it would allow teachers to assign more writing assignments which would improve skills. With this though, if students aren’t able to see red marks written on their paper, or the teacher has no knowledge of what they are writing…is this really going to help improve their writing abilities?

I, for one, think that the Robo-readers are a horrible idea. I realize that reading essays is very time consuming, but having a robot read and grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds is ridiculous. There is no way that it would be able to give an accurate score, like a human would be able to do. The Robo-readers not only take away from the writers experience to see the mistakes that they made, but it also takes away from the teachers ability to be able to sit down with a student and go over the work together. All in all, Robo-readers are something that I hope I will never have to deal with because it cannot be as accurate as a human would be scoring an essay.