Humor: One of National Public Radio's best
shows, Car Talk, will cease
producing new broadcasts in a few weeks. Too bad!
Sports: Congratulations to the Oklahoma City Thunder,
who are in the finals of the National Basketball Association
championships, for the first time as the Thunder (the franchise used to
be located in Seattle). This is the only major professional sports team
in Oklahoma. There are several states with no such franchise, including
South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, New Mexico, Montana,
Iowa, Kentucky, Nevada, Idaho, and others.
The Arts: (sort of) National Public Radio reports on
grading
student writing by computer.
(and manufacturing, and computing) A blog post about the
artistic possibilities of 3-D printing.
Image source (public domain)
4 comments:
I am not surprised that Educational Testing Service has their own program. It would make those AP tests so much less expensive to grade than having the traditional readings. Looked for the total number of AP tests given but did not find that data. (From NPR link on grading student writing by computer)
No, I'm not surprised, either. But, as indicated, computer testing of essays is far from reliable.
Thanks, Fred.
I'd say computer testing is unfair.
When I was in AP English, the tests were graded by County teachers that taught the AP English classes. They came to an agreement about what they taught and even encouraged.
Not all teachers taught strict sentence structure. My AP English teacher even said, Hemingway followed no rules - base your writing on how you think you can get your message across clearly and that would make people say "Wow, that was a good story.!"
I also think AP English tests may err on spell checks more easily.
Unfair? Perhaps. It depends on what you mean by fair.
But I don't think it's ready for prime time yet, if ever.
If we really want to teach good writing, whether for a budding Hemingway or a blogger, intelligent human instruction is needed. So far, anyway.
Thanks.
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