I have worked with Vantage Learning’s MY Access Automated Essay Scoring product both as a teacher and as a secondary ELA Curriculum specialist for grades 6-12.  As a teacher, I immediately saw the benefits of the program. My students were more motivated to write because they knew that they would receive immediate feedback upon completion and submission of their essays.  I also taught my students how to use the “My Tutor” and “My Editor” feedback in order to revise their essays. In the past, I felt like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up the hill, but with MY Access that heavy weight was lifted and my students were revising using specific feedback from My Access and consequently their writing drastically improved. When it comes to giving instantaneous feedback, MY Access performed more efficiently than myself.  

More than 350 research studies conducted both in-house and by third-party experts have determined that IntelliMetric® has levels of consistency, accuracy and reliability that meet, and more often exceed, those of human expert scorers. After performing the practice DWA within SAUSD, I surveyed our English teachers and asked them about their recent experience with MY Access. Of the 85 teachers that responded to the survey, 82% of the teachers felt that their students’ experience with MY Access was either fair, good or very good. Similarly, 75% of the teachers thought the accuracy of the scoring was fair, good, or very good. Lastly, 77% of the teachers surveyed said that they would like to use MY Access in their classrooms as an instructional tool.  

Many of the teachers’ responses to the MY Access survey included a call for a plagiarism detector. At the time, we had not opted for the addition of Cite Smart, the onboard plagiarism detector for MY Access This year, however, we will be using it and teachers across the district are excited to have this much needed tool available. 

As a teacher and as an ELA curriculum specialist, I know of no other writing tool available to teachers that is more helpful than MY Access. When I tell teachers that we will be using MY Access for instruction and not just benchmarking this year, the most common reply I receive is “Oh great! That means that I can teach a lot more writing!” Think about it - if a secondary teacher has 175 students (35 students in 5 periods) and the teacher takes 10 minutes to provide feedback on each student’s paper, then it would take the teacher 29 hours (1,750 minutes) to give effective feedback to his/her students. MY Access is a writing teacher’s best friend! 

Jason Crabbe 

Secondary Language Arts Curriculum Specialist 

Santa Ana Unified School District