I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

The owner of one of England’s three major exam boards is to introduce artificial intelligence-based automated marking of English exam essays in the UK from next month.

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Computers have been programmed to scan the papers, recognise the possible right responses and tot up the marks. Pearson claims this will be more accurate than human marking.

John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said that computers could be useful in many areas of assessment but cautioned against their use in English exams: “I’m very concerned that it would constrain the nature of the questions being asked. You won’t pick up nuances by machine and it will trigger a trend to answering narrower questions. It could be a disaster waiting to happen.”

Response from Rich Kulawiec via IP:

Interesting. I wonder how long it will be before some enterprising student acquires a copy of the scoring program and runs a series of experiments designed to ascertain which text corpus yields the maximum grade, then memorizes that, takes the test, and dutifully reproduces it verbatim — whether or not it actually makes any sense to a human.