Hewlett Foundation offering $100,000 for design of automated essay grader

[da5e]

http://blog.coursekit.com/post/17766559470

[mgallivan]

That's ridiculous. Essays are already being shoe-horned into the 3-paragraph/introduction/conclusion format and (I believe) it's quite harmful to budding writers.

An automated system of marking will mean two things:

1. Students will write more essays because they can be marked faster but... 2. The increased quantity will dictate an even more strict "style".

[drallison]

Hmmm.... more information here: http://www.kaggle.com/c/asap-aes. There are three awards: 1st: $60,000, 2nd: $30,000, and 3rd: $10,000.

The award level seems low even though "[E]ach team maintains full, exclusive and absolute rights to their intellectual property".

[brmj]

I suspect that any truly adequate automated essay grader would imply strong AI or at the very least some optimization process good enough that it might as well be strong AI.

[veyron]

    ...  to gage students’ work ...

Really? "gage"? This is an academic blog ...