FYI: GRE/Writing, Minority Lang, Lang Acquisition
| Author: |
don powers
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| FYI Body: |
Dear Colleague: We are seeking help with research we are conducting on behalf of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) Board. Our research concerns the automated (or computer) scoring of open-ended essay responses. In particular, we are studying the feasibility of applying automated scoring methods to the kinds of essays that will be written for the new GRE Writing Assessment. As you probably know, the automated scoring of essay responses is now becoming a realistic possibility. Our "challenge" to you is to try to "beat" the current version of our automated scoring system, or e-rater, as we call it. The "game," should you choose to play, is to write essays that will be problematical for e-rater. By "problematical" we mean essays that would get scores from e-rater that are either too high or too low, relative to the scores assigned by human readers. We hope to learn both (a) how robust e-rater is to attempts to foil it, and (b) whether it undervalues certain kinds or styles of writing. Ideally, our findings will enable us to distinguish between failures that are easily correctable and ones that are more serious because they stem from fundamental differences in the ways that humans and computers understand language. Although we can't compensate participants for their time, we hope we can entice you by providing feedback on how successful your challenges were, as well as a summary of the challenges made by other participants. (We'll also award $250 to a writer whose essay is greatly undervalued by e-rater, and $250 to another whose essay is greatly overrated.) If you are interested in participating, please let us know as soon as you can (dpowers@ets.org), and we'll send further details. Thanks. Sincerely, Don Powers Principal Research Scientis Educational Testing Service |
