Robo-nono

Moving toward a common core standard created by President Obama has forced teachers accross America to consider feeding students written essays through a machine called an E-Rater. Michael Winerip from the New York Times explains that the impressiveness from the E-Rater comes from the fact that this technology can grade about 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. Steve Kolowich from the Inside Higher Ed assures worried students and teachers that "the differences, across a number of different brands of automated essay scoring software (AES) and essay types, were minute. The results demonstrated that over all, autmated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended response writing items." However great this new software may sound, further experiements have exposes significant flaws in the E-Rater.
 In my opinion, there is absoluty no way an automated correcting machine will ever be able to  function like an actual human brain. Being "easily gamed, vulnerable to test prep, sets a very limited and rigid standard for what good writing is, and will pressure teachers to dumb down writing instructions," are all flaws stated by Winerip. However, what makes these E-Raters even worse is the fact that they don't cross check facts students use to back up an argument. I believe that if E-Raters are used to correct essays, students will soon learn of all the "cheats" that the E-Rater identifies as "good" writing skills and will ultimatly produce a higher score. In essence, these E-Raters will eventually force students to create horrible writing habbits all for the desire of a higher score on standardized tests.
ETS Website explicitly goes into detail to explain just how the the new E-Raters work. It is described as an engine composed of a "multiplicity of independent sub-features." Intrestingly, none of the said sub-features is that of a cross checking database. ETS website sais the features include "content analysis based on vocabulary measures, lexical complexity/diction, proportion of grammar errors, proportion of usage errors, proportion of mechanial errors, organization and develpment scores, and features rewarding idiomatic phraseology." To be honest, I didn't know what half of those features even means. I almost think that the creators of this machine doesn't want anyone to know exactly how it works and makes all teachers simply believe by word of mouth that it would be a better option to grade written assignments.
However, the only thing I will compliment this E-Rater on is consistency. The simple fact that the teacher knows that every single test will be graded exactly the same every time.