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How Automated Scoring Dramatically Improves Essay Grade Consistency

Teachers work tirelessly to ensure the success of their students. School districts know it, and they need a way to keep teachers satisfied in their careers by relieving them of the undue strain of grading essays.

When a teacher returns graded essays back a week or two late, parents and students become frustrated. What's often overlooked is that grading essays is time-consuming, and usually teachers collect papers from more than one class.

Teachers are forced to choose: Rush to finish grading papers on time, and return them with inconsistencies, or return accurately graded papers weeks later.

Learn how automated scoring solves this old problem.

 Automated Scoring Is Not Subject To Time Constraints

Many teachers start grading papers at the beginning of the school year with the best intentions. They take their time, carefully read each essay, and assign an accurate grade along with helpful feedback for the student.

But most teachers can’t keep this up all year long due to the sheer volume of essays they have to grade after school hours and the fact that they have families, friends, and responsibilities outside of work.

By the end of the school year, either the quality of grading is not consistent with what it used to be, or teachers are struggling to get through backlogged papers before summer break.

Automated scoring, on the other hand, is always consistent and always on time because computer programs don’t fatigue. An automatic essay grader can score hundreds of essays in a fraction of the time it would take a teacher.

 

The Most Accurate Automated Scoring Uses Machine Learning

Automated-scoring engines assign scores differently than teachers do. They match the characteristics of student responses with scores assigned by expert graders. Then, they analyze those relationships to predict scores for new student essays.

The engines are trained using hundreds to thousands of professionally scored essays. Grades assigned by the engines are evaluated to make sure that they are at least as accurate, if not more so, than the grades a scoring expert would assign.

Intellimetric is the most trustworthy automated-scoring engine in its class. Our next blog will further discuss the shift toward using automatic essay graders in the classroom.