Interesting Links for 03-07-2018

[andrewducker]

Prototype Discworld spotted in the wild

(tags: terrypratchett turtle )

We're Not Addicted to Smartphones, We're Addicted to Social Interaction

(tags: psychology addiction phones socialnetworking )

More States Opting to 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays by Computer (even though cheating is easy)

(tags: computers essays automation teaching )

The lost standing stones of Devon are still hiding from archaeologists

(tags: archaeology Devon uk )

MPs request Bank and Treasury Brexit analysis. Today. Not two fucking years ago.

(tags: UK Europe incompetence OhForFucksSake economics )

Comments

More States Opting to 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays by Computer (even though cheating is easy)

[jack]

Ouch.

I mean, on the one hand, *part* of learning is indeed learning to produce an essay which looks superficially good: learning to use basically correct grammar, to produce an essay of the right length, etc, is a skill that people do need, and not everyone manages. And you can easily imagine that if you automate that sort of thing, it's a lot quicker for a human to mark. Coding has taught me that: tools that automatically force everyone to indent properly leave more time for reviewing actual code.

But on the other hand, openly saying, "lets spend fifteen years learning to write a particular essay style, completely disregarding any notion of whether you have any level of understanding whatsoever" just feels awful. No wonder people don't like school :( No wonder people read news articles that say things authoritatively that are just actual nonsense :(

I guess another way of looking at it is, "schools are so underfunded teachers already don't have time to mark 'properly', we're just acknowledging it". But even then -- even if you have extremely limited teacher time to spend, surely you could do somewhat better? :(