?
Automated Essay Grading with Automated Essay Rater (AER)
The use of Automated Essay Rater (AER) technology is becoming increasingly popular in the education sector as a way of automatically scoring student essays. AER technology is specially designed to assess the quality of written pieces, providing quicker and more accurate feedback to teachers and students than manual grading.
Essay grading traditionally requires a human reader to evaluate a student’s responses, making pros and cons judgement calls on various elements of the essay. This subjective process, while necessary, is time consuming and subject to external conditions such as the mood of the reader. With AER, automated scoring can be done with higher consistency and accuracy, allowing more time for instructors to give students meaningful feedback and advice.
AER works by quickly analyzing an essay and assigning a score by looking for specific criteria. A ‘rubric’ is a formula or criteria used to rate the essay and provide feedback about its strengths and weaknesses. AER can also generate an ‘overall score’ which provides a more expansive feedback on the essay’s overall strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.
The use of AER in education comes with a few advantages. Firstly,Automated Essay Rater (AER) is incredibly helpful for teachers who can quickly and accurately grade a large amount of essays at once. This technology can also identify important components within an essay and provide quantitative insights that manual grading may not provide. On the student side, they receive feedback quicker. With automated grading, they know exactly what they need to work on and can use the feedback to improve their writing skills.
In the future, AER technology is likely to continue advancing and becoming more intuitive. Improvements in machine learning algorithms means that AER will be able to pick up on nuance and more sophisticated elements of language, grammar, and composition. Automated Essay Raters will be able to better mimic the grading style of a particular teacher or institution and personalize feedback for each student.
This technology is still in in its infancy and is a very long way from replacing human graders entirely. But Automated Essay Rater technology has been advancing by leaps and bounds and has the potential to revolutionize the way essays are graded. And, reflective of the trend towards automation of society at large, AER’s utilization in the educational system is likely to become commonplace.