Accessibility Tools

Machine Scoring of Student Essays

Truth and Consequences

edited by Patricia Freitag Ericsson and Richard Haswell

Ebook Price $19.95
30-day ebook rental price $5.99

Buy Now


The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active.

Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment.

Reading and evaluating student writing is a time-consuming process, yet it is a vital part of both student placement and coursework at post-secondary institutions. In recent years, commercial computer-evaluation programs have been developed to score student essays in both of these contexts. Two-year colleges have been especially drawn to these programs, but four-year institutions are moving to them as well, because of the cost-savings they promise. Unfortunately, to a large extent, the programs have been written, and institutions are installing them, without attention to their instructional validity or adequacy.

Since the education software companies are moving so rapidly into what they perceive as a promising new market, a wider discussion of machine-scoring is vital if scholars hope to influence development and/or implementation of the programs being created. What is needed, then, is a critical resource to help teachers and administrators evaluate programs they might be considering, and to more fully envision the instructional consequences of adopting them. And this is the resource that Ericsson and Haswell are providing here.

 

Patricia Freitag Ericsson is associate professor emeritus at Washington State University, where she served as director of Composition and director of the Digital Technology and Culture Degree Program. She has published widely in journals, including Journal of Teaching Writing, English Education, The Clearing House, and Computers and Composition, as well as edited collections. She is editor of Sexual Harassment and Cultural Change in Writing Studies and coeditor of Machine Scoring of Student Essays: Truth and Consequences with Rich Haswell.

Richard Haswell retired from Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, in 2005. At Washington State University, he directed the composition program (1972–82) and the cross-campus writing-assessment program (1993–96). He is author of Gaining Ground in College Writing (1991), coauthor of Early Holistic Scoring of Writing (2019) with Norbert Elliot, Authoring (2010) and Hospitality and Authoring (2015) with Janis Haswell, and coeditor of Comp Tales (2000), Beyond Outcomes (2001), and Machine Scoring of Student Essays (2006). With colleague Glenn Blalock, he created CompPile, an online bibliography of scholarship in composition and rhetoric.

Utah State University Press Logo

Details

  • Ebook Price: $19.95
  • 30-day ebook rental price: $5.99
  • EISBN: 978-0-87421-536-6
  • Publication Year: 2006
  • Pages: 274
  • Discount Type: Short
  • Author: edited by Patricia Freitag Ericsson and Richard Haswell
  • ECommerce Code: 978-0-87421-632-5
  • Get Permissions: Get Permission

Related Titles

Browse Related Titles Tagged Under:

University Press of Colorado University of Alaska Press Utah State University Press University of Wyoming Press