Professor Slacker

When EdX was designing essay-grading software, we’re sure they thought they were helping.

Dystopias always start out that way.

They were thinking of the overworked professor or grad student teaching a class of hundreds. They were thinking of the students and the gift of instant feedback.

The ease. The expediency. The effectiveness.

Excuse us as we shriek: The horror. The horror.

We appreciate the gesture, but we don’t pay thousands of dollars a year to have our essays graded by some program.

We don’t write essays on modern Japanese literature or the intricacies of Machiavelli’s political theory for laughs. We want the professor’s feedback. We want the benefit of their expertise. 

We study under humans instead of computers for a reason. We ask for the privilege of our professors’ knowledge, knowledge which they can share through personal assessments of our papers.

Education has already been stripped of enough of its soul. Can’t we hold onto this one final piece?

EdX eases symptoms of our ailing education system without addressing the cause. Making classes smaller would solve the same problems, and then some.

The only leg-up software has over professors is the perk of instant feedback, but when it comes to essays, instant feedback isn’t much of a perk.

Students need time to distance ourselves from our stretched arguments, questionable support and confused metaphors. We need time to move on and start a new relationship with a funnier, smarter essay.

After we get over it, we won’t be as defensive when our reasoning is critiqued, our conclusions questioned, our writing ripped apart.

Computers are great at processing scantrons and calculating grades, but they will never be able to grade essays as well as a human person.

Human language is too complicated, nuanced and subjective to be adequately assessed by a series of algorithms and codes. It takes human faculties to evaluate an essay, faculties that have not yet been emulated in computers.

Most importantly, a person can tell gobbledygook from a well-formed, well-stated argument.

Les Perelman, the president of the Consortium for Research in the Evaluation of Writing, has repeatedly written nonsense essays that have garnered high marks by computer graders.

Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and yes, Indiana, are all looking for ways to incorporate these programs into their secondary schools.

Please, Indiana, don’t do it.

Don’t take our professors’ notes away from us, or else we’re going to become very proficient in gibberish.