Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 9, 2012 Deadline August 2012 Issue The Teacher’s Pet: Computers Grade Homework While technology long ago replaced human grading of multiple-choice exams, with the familiar “machine gun” rattle of Scantron machines heard in schools around the globe, few teachers expected software to start grading student essays. Early this year a research paper was published by Mark Shermis, dean of the University of Akron’s College of Education. Co-authored with two graduate students, the paper went unnoticed until it was reposted on in the New York Times and featured on National Public Radio this summer. This report, “Contrasting State-of-the-Art Automated Scoring of Essays,” compared nine software-based systems for grading student papers. The researchers found, “By and large, the scoring engines did a good of replicating the mean scores for all of the data sets.” Surprisingly, software-calculated grades matched the grades teachers would have assigned...