Essay Grading :: essays research papers

I was going through a bunch of old magazines and newspapers this week when I came upon an article around about software that was being developed for instructors to use that would grade assays. Over the departed weekend I had the opportunity to talk to my aunt who was a teacher and college professor before she retired. She said, there is nothing better to assess a students knowledge of a subject, than an essay especially when compared to a true or false or multiple choice exams.Unfortunately, grading essays is extremely time-consuming, and sometimes grading can be inconsistent. Now there is a electronic information processing system program that can grade essays as well as compassionateness according to its developer Thomas Landauer. "From sixth graders to first-year medical students, we get consistently good results," says Thomas Landauer, a psychology professor at the University of cobalt who has been working on the program for 10 years.The program, developed into its present course of action in 1997, uses "latent semantic analysis," a type of artificial erudition based on complex mathematical formulas that attempt to mimic the human language function. Developed by Landauer, psychologist Peter Foltz of New Mexico State University and doctoral student Darrell Laham of Colorado, the program cant get bored, rushed, sleepy or forgetful. And this, Landauer says, gives it perfect soundbox in grading.To grade text, operators feed the computer general information about the subject to be tested, which can include from 50,000 to 10 million course entered from course textbooks. The program then assigns a mathematical degree of parity or distance between individual wrangling used by the textbooks and other voice communication in general use. This allows students to use different words that mean the same thing for example, "physician" and "doctor." The program then evaluates essays against assay tests that have already bee n graded by human instructors and professors. It then takes the combining of words in the student essay and computes its similarity to the combination of words in the essays to come up with a grade.The student can yield a grade similar to the one on the sample essay his work most closely matches. To achieve this, the software uses about a gigabyte of computer memory, or ten times that of the average household personal computer. My computer at home has 128 megabytes of R.A.M (random access memory) so my computer would need about eight times more R.A.M to run this program.