Induction

Movement 1:
Heaven's Gates

Movement 2:
Cyborgs Can't be Educated

Movement 3:
You are Here!

Movement 4:
A Cyborg Humanist's Vision

I Don't Want to be a Computer!-1/3

Computer software to grade essay exams? Touted as important to help students as well as teachers. Okay, so what do I do? I feed in 10 million words from on-line textbooks so the computer can learn. Then I read enough essays to provide the computer with a statistical sample of "good" and "bad" essays. Then, presto, the computer does the rest. The proof of the effectiveness of the software is that the computer-assigned grades correlate well with human-assigned grades. The disclosed limitation is that the software does not evaluate writing style. Style is surely disposable and, who knows, version 2.0 may add an objective measure of style.

I’m strongly supportive of technology in research and teaching. So why does this innovation (and, perhaps as much, that the Colorado Daily and the Daily Camera reported it–April 16, 1998) make me feel ill? It is not that I think that the software does not do what it is claimed of it, including its high correlation with human assigned grades. I am sure also that, under the circumstances described, it would also be more "objective." Isn’t that a given? How could a computer be anything but objective?

What bothers me is what goes unchallenged in both the design of the software and in the reported comments evaluating it. What is not questioned is how we have come to think of education. It seems that we have bought–lock, stock, and barrel–into equating education with the acquisition of information, with an objectivist enterprise in which the haves are paid by the have-nots to be given what they lack. That lack is invariably identified as "content" and content is information. This is certainly how computers learn, if we can say that they learn at all. They take in information and use algorithms to account for the organization of the information. To be educated is then to have acquired information and to be able to discern its organization based on given algorithms.

Behind this understanding of education are a host of common expectations and practices related to evaluating students. The teachers have specific answers to their own questions. They ask students questions to see if the students know the answers, though they keep them secret until after the examination. Students taking exams must not only know the information, they must know what the teacher is looking for or expecting when asking examination questions. In other words, they must guess the secret. Teachers are faulted when they do not evaluate student papers consistently or when they do not state objective evaluative criteria. There are many other faces of this system which are rather ugly to my eye.

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